On the 7th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370, members of the MH370 Independent Group have released separate reports that analyze two wing parts that have been recovered from East Africa. The two parts represent the first and most recent pieces of MH370 that have been found. Both reports conclude that the flight likely ended in a high speed descent.
The first report, authored by Tom Kenyon, is the culmination of several years of work of structural analysis of the right flaperon that was recovered from Reunion Island in July 2015. After performing a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) on a numerical model of the flaperon and reviewing photographs of the damaged part, Tom believes that the damage on the part is not consistent with damage expected if the flaperon was attached to the wing as it impacted water. Rather, the damage to the two hinge attachments is consistent with high cycle fatigue from torsional flutter, which likely led to separation from the aircraft while still airborne. Based on Tom’s review of simulations of uncontrolled descents for the B777, he concludes the expected airspeeds are well beyond design limits that lead to flutter and structural failure.
The second report, authored by Mike Exner and Don Thompson, analyzes a part that was recovered from Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, in August 2020. Based on an evaluation of features and markings, the authors positively identify the part as either spoiler #8 or spoiler #9 from the right wing from a Boeing 777, and by extension, almost certainly from MH370.
The authors observe that the spoiler detached at structures that attach the spoiler to the rear spar of the right wing. The fracture along a chord line is consistent with bending of the spar along the span of the wing. At high airspeeds, wings dynamically flex due to flutter, and the dynamic aeroelastic loads that are induced will rapidly grow until the wing structurally fails.
A visualization of wing flutter can be seen in this video of a scaled model of a B747 in a wind tunnel.
The high speed descent theorized in both reports is consistent with the final BFO values recorded by the Inmarsat Ground Earth Station (GES) on March 8, 2014, at 00:19z. Those values suggest the plane was in a 0.7g downward acceleration. Without inputs from a skilled pilot, the aircraft would have impacted the ocean shortly after reaching this condition, which would mean the debris field on the seabed is relatively close to the 7th arc.
Statement from Transport Minister Wee:
Malaysia will make reasonable efforts to continue the search for MH370 in cooperation with China and Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RGdQ_zJtyk
I guess that’s the important announcement previously teased.
Victor: Nice summary of the work Tom, Don and I have been working on. It’s interesting that the first debris article and the most recent show hints and some evidence of flutter. Several other pieces in-between also support this view. Hopefully AAIB-MY will see this as credible new evidence and take steps to reconsider the implications for a next search.
It should be noted that if we are correct about the inflight separations, MH370 is almost certainly quite close to the 7th arc and it was missed, probably due to it being in a deep canyon or otherwise obscured by terrain. Therefore, one of our recommendations is to conduct any future search concentrated along the 7th arc using closer spacing (higher resolution).
@ALSB @DonT
Surprising that the spoiler was found back in August_2020? I had heard it was found a little while ago, but I was thinking that was early Feb_2021.
@Victor. Transport Minister’s statement. I note the absence of any indication that a search was in the offing.
@airlandseaman
@Don Thomson
Good work. Thank you.
@Tom Kenyon
and Thank you for your Consolidated Report.
@paul smithson
RE: “You reach RUNUT (13.83S) at 2100 with fuel remaining 17.0 to 17.5T, GW=191. At that weight, indicated optimal altitude is FL400 (and you don’t get to optimal FL420 until GW=170T). So if you are choosing even number FLs, then best altitude at RUNUT/2100 and beyond would seem to be FL400. Does that sound about right?”
Yes, that sounds about right. The FPPM shows the LRC optimum altitude at 190T is FL400. It would be slightly lower if the speed were higher than LRC, but not by much.
As Victor mentioned , a high Cost Index will result in a high Mach during ECON cruise.
@David: It boils down to this: If independent investigators present credible new evidence (at the determination of Malaysia), Malaysia will review proposals in which private companies assume all the risk of a failed search, and then Malaysia will decide whether they agree to re-start to search. So basically, there is no commitment on the part of Malaysia to do anything other than to say nice things.
I think K S Narendran (Naren) has it right in his most recent blog post:
https://linesabouttimes.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/mh370-seven-years-on-all-quiet-on-the-search-front/
I have just listened to an interview, here on National Radio in New Zealand, with Florence de Changy. Essentially it was a discussion of about 20 minutes on her latest book.
Oh dear !
She latches on to a variety of issues that have not been properly explained, but ignores factual information, and then goes on to weave an incredible [or is that incredulous] story about how we are all being deceived by “Official” sources.
The first point she made was that the turnback at IGARI was “impossible to perform in a 777”. Really. She then went on to discount the flaperon because it was missing it’s data plate, and that it couldn’t possibly float for 15 months or whatever because Tony Abbott said that all the debris would sink.
Then there was the mystery about the mangosteens, and the other cargo of batteries etc that “had not been scanned”.
And the famous MAYDAY call heard by another pilot . . . and the two AWACS exercising in the South China Sea, and the satcom logon at about 18XX “near the Chinese airspace border” after the AWACS had stopped blocking.
Virtually everything she talked about was cobbled together from innuendo and supposition.
As many have said of journalists before . . . don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
I wouldn’t bother reading the book.
@Tom Kenyon & All,
Thank you for your impressive reports. Possibly also previously discussed…
Are the witness marks between flaperon and flap used to determine they were retracted consistent with flutter?
Would all of the debris items with trailing edge damage have detached in flight?
@Victori:
I agree with your approach to weighing the strengths and weaknesses for a candidate site or scenario.
For the Java site, additional strengths are barnacle growth, that the area was never searched at all, and no dependency on motivations or intent of the pilot.
As for implosion as a weakness, I parenthetically mentioned my current thinking that the seismometer epicenter is the site of sinking debris impacting the seafloor. I had set out to search for implosions, and I had previously interpreted the sequence as P- and S-waves followed by T-wave conversions along the Java coast. Mapping autocorrelations shows that there are multiple matching events that overlap, first a weak one, then a very strong impulse, followed later by more weak matches. I believe this would be multiple pieces of debris. This simplifies the calculation of the epicenter, and would allow improved accuracy by geologists with advanced tools and info on the local speed variations.
Another interesting insight is a new explanation for the sound pattern seen at the Cocos flyby. Two broadband bursts, first from N-S, then E-W separated by 80 seconds. My original guess that it was sound interaction with the walls of the seismometer vault should have shown spectral resonances. After tracking other planes, it has become clear that the sound of the jet would not be conducted through the water, and only weakly through the air to the seismometer. Instead, the sound is conducted through the ground closest to the plane. Cocos Island is an atoll, and a 15 degree bank autopilot turn past the airport is a close match the 80 second delay between flying over the ground to the north, over the lagoon, and then east.
As for the path being complex, it simply connects the dots between sound detections. The waypoints could be tossed if that’s seen as complex, with only a minor effect on speeds. The final jog was meant to keep the speed relatively constant. It could instead be a slow climb to improve fuel efficiency, followed by a rapid descent.
An interesting development is that there were two radar installations on Christmas Island looking north to watch for boats packed with asylum seekers. One was newly installed on a tower in late 2013, and the older setup may have still been in operation. The manufacturer responded that “the data is owned by the government”.
It’s nearly a confirmation that it could be analyzed by official request.
@Paul Smithson,
Thanks for the detailed update on your scenario. I had a map bookmark and notes for your site from a Mar 27, 2017 discussion on drift. My apologies for not keeping up.
As fuel endurance is key to your site, and Andrew has made it clear that the autopilot flies with wide safety margins, I wonder how much fuel might be gained by flying at the optimal altitude for weight, but risking a stall from air density changes.
@Brian Anderson,
I agree that the FDC book and dozens of radio interviews are pretty outrageous. I’ve been taking @Fchangy to task on Twitter. In her france24.com interview, she confesses,
“Most of my WORK initially was to challenge, discredit, I mean, dismantle and eventually completely discredit the official narrative”.
She rejects any criticism unless someone has bought her book and read it all. A french military expert on AWACS and flight interception actually did that, and posted a 52 min expert analysis of her book. She refused to watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9AHj0pNufo
It’s in French, but the captions can be auto-translated.
Also, for anyone wanting to fair use access to books for fact-checking, try searching at “Library Genesis” for MH370.
@ALSM, Don Thompson. Thank you for your most useful and thorough Jeffreys Bay Debris analysis.
The below is intended to be a critique.
Your End-of-Flight-Considerations’ comment about the condition of the right inboard spoiler, outboard part flap and flaperon was, “The damage exhibited by these three structures is consistent with a span-wise, destructive, flex of the right wing.”
So I take it you envisage divergent wing flutter which breaks the spar, the shock inertial loading joining with the aerodynamic and shattering the attachment of these three?
That the flap was broken in bending, the chordwise break of the spoiler was subsequent to separation and that the missing trailing edges had separated earlier?
Supposing so, some notes and comments on the likelihood of such a flutter are:
• In 737 (SilkAir) and 747(China Airways) high speed dives, so far as I know component flutter, particularly of the empennage, occurred without other wing failure (though I hasten to add that would not affect your conclusion that this was a terminal dive).
But were component flutter first in MH370, that would not explain spoiler separation, its edges being supported. Further, were there flaperon or outer flap trailing edge separation in flutter, there would need to be a yet higher speed to induce flutter in their rumps. Judging by the ATSB mutual damage report, these would need to separate simultaneously. However I think that unlikely from earlier damage assessments I have posted.
• @Kenyon’s Consolidated Studies showed us that the flight envelope could be grossly exceeded. While we can assume that wing flutter boundaries would have been exceeded, can we take that as read?
• Some points about that:
1. If the descent rate and similar acceleration continued, without autopilot would there be pitch-up due to IAS/Mach, or pitch down, ‘Mach tuck’? Pitch either way could be divergent and break the wing? (In Boeing wing strength failure tests the right broke first. In the air that would relieve the left’s load.)
2. In Tom’s depicted descents where the flight envelope is well exceeded, the Mach number is above 1 and about 1.3 in one case. I doubt the aircraft would reach those, without autopilot anyway, and even with, without engines.
3. While the ATSB said of the Boeing simulations that some exceeded the flight envelope, as Tom has shown, surely Boeing would have noticed and said so had theirs exceeded the flutter envelope?
4. In at least one of ALSM’s level D simulations there was a tight spiral that would have exceeded the flight envelope limits I believe. At very high speed the wing might have been broken in exceeding its strength limits, in which case the wing could have broken before the onset of flutter.
One final comment is that the right flaperon’s closing panel that you mentioned was similar to one recovered from the left’s. Also the left outboard flap’s outer part shed its trailing edge – as might the right’s, judging by its inboard’s having been shed. For all we know the left aileron might have been shed too.
Yet supporting a more numerous separation from the right wing is the imbalance of flap fairing parts recovered and the right part-aileron separation, together with the right engine vortex generator’s part-cowling.
A stray observation is that the inboard flaps might too have separated, or in any case there is some damage to the flaperon inboard end that looks like it has been hit.
All that said, a final question is whether you could have included the right aileron part’s separation with those three?
The above and @Kenyon’s thesis could be resolved if Malaysia would ask Boeing whether wing flutter or component flutter had been likely in its simulations; though as above I really would have hoped that that would have been evident already, if so.
@Viking & @Arto L,
Thanks for looking at the Christmas Island flyby report, Martin. Here’s a spectrogram that should cover the area of interest:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TTm3BenZ0n8rC4c2W2__x27Uamoq5JdW/view
This is from the quieter XMIS seismometer in the center of the island. XMI at the airport picks up a lot of machinery noise. The timing starts just after the strong seismic waves from the nearby M4.1 quake, but includes the hydroacoustic T-wave for reference.
There may be a very weak event with some doppler around 00:04:30Z.
The reference to the A380 signature is for scheduled flights that go between Cocos and Christmas islands. (See the infrasound analysis page for timing details). It’s hard to say how accurate the polarization bearing and inclination might be. I previously assumed that the sound was transmitted through the air. I now realize that the dominant polarization would for the direction of sound waves interacting with the ground nearest the plane. For this plot, the bearing goes from NW-SE to NE-SW at 04:30, then back again.
The 48 hrs of METEOSAT7 images I have are taken every 30 min, with 5 frames missing for 19:30-21:30Z (47MB crop):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TTm3BenZ0n8rC4c2W2__x27Uamoq5JdW/view
It’s a composite of R=IR G=Vis B=IRWaterVapor. I use Fiji (ImageJ) to split channels and zoom in. In the visible band alone, I see cloud tops just lit at 23:30Z, and what might look like N-S contrails. Looking in the infrared though, the same cloud formations are there pre-dawn.
Are we looking at the same data? Maybe my timestamps are off?
370Location, Viking, ArtoL (reply to a previous post’s comment)
Emirates and Qantas Dubai-Melbourne services passed over the IO much later in the day on 2014-03-08
On 2014-03-08, the Dubai-Adelaide, Doha-Perth, Dubai-Perth flights might be in your time frame but they all routed through the Maldives FIR and exited at waypoint SOLIH which puts them way further south than Christmas Island.
More likely origin within, or overflight through, Chennai FIR.
@David wrote “The above and @Kenyon’s thesis could be resolved if Malaysia would ask Boeing whether wing flutter or component flutter had been likely in its simulations”
I doubt that any design analysis helps greatly here.
My proposal, with which Mike concurs, is that an engineering simulation is undertaken, to determine how the wing, its attached flight control stuctures, and the attachment mechs, perform in destruction.
We have observations:
1a: 00:19:29UTC, GES Log On Request, high RoD;
1b: 00:19:37UTC, GES Log On Acknowledge, higher RoD;
1c: Circa 00:22:00UTC, an absent sequence of datalink traffic from the IFE system.
2: A catalogue of debris.
Item 2 presents the dichotomy between the articles of debris that appear somewhat intact, inconsistent with an impact resulting from the observed RoD, whereas most of the catalogue does evidence catastophic impact.
Modelling destruction cases for the wing is a necessary next step.
Peter Foley comments: The Australian, repeating the Times, 8th Jan:
“The head of the inconclusive search for MH370, the Boeing 777 aircraft that vanished seven years ago today (Monday), has called for a new inquiry based on fresh evidence.
Peter Foley, who led the Australian government’s multimillion-dollar hunt for the Malaysian Airlines jet, told The Times he agreed with new research produced by oceanographers and flight experts suggesting the wreckage might lie at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles off Australia.
The night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 passengers and crew. It had mysteriously reversed course and had flown south until it ran out of fuel.
Two searches failed to find any trace of the aircraft, but 33 pieces of debris – confirmed or classed as highly likely to be from MH370 – have been found in Mauritius, Madagascar, Tanzania and South Africa.
Pressure for a new search came after analysis of the latest piece of wreckage, part of a wing spoiler found in South Africa last August. A report released by an independent group of experts yesterday (Sunday) said damage indicated that it had been torn off the aircraft in an uncontrolled high-speed dive.
The finding counters alternate theories of a ditching by a rogue pilot. Ocean drift analysis and a review of a revised flight path released late last year agreed that MH370 probably went down about 1,900 kilometres west of Cape Leeuwin, Western Australia, in an area notorious for its deep ocean floor canyons and underwater mountains.
Foley, who oversaw the world’s largest high-resolution sonar search for MH370 covering nearly 129,500 square kilometres of ocean floor, said that a new inquiry should inspect the sea floor 70 nautical miles either side of the target area. “Large tracts haven’t been searched fully,” he said.
Blaine Gibson, who has devoted much of his life in recent years to seeking the wreckage, supported a third search. The American lawyer, 63, said that updated modelling by Charitha Pattiaratchi, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, made a strong case for another search. Professor Pattiaratchi had predicted where debris would be a year before the first piece was found.
The Malaysian government has said that it would need compelling new evidence before mounting another search.
The Times
@370Location:
The timestamps of your METEOSAT7 images seem ok based on the time of sunrise. The one possible contrail I can see at XMAS island area is most clearly visible in the March 8th 00:30 UTC visual image. I can spot it also in the 00:00 image, but the lighting conditions are worse. by 01:00 it seems to have dissipated. It is oriented NW – SE with the NW end at about 7S 102E.
@370Location: I think barnacle growth is among the weakest of the evidence we have for many reasons, including the fact that the last part of the path across the Indian Ocean is shared by a large range of starting latitudes along the 7th arc. I’ve seen people use the barnacle growth data to justify southern latitudes, northern latitudes, and also scenarios that include planted debris. I think the interpretation of drift results, especially when applied to multiple recovered debris, is many times more useful.
@Don Thompson: If you believe the spoiler separated due to bending of the rear wing spar, I wouldn’t model the entire wing. Rather, an FEA of the spoiler and the attachments to the spar should be sufficient. You can impose deflections at the spar attachments corresponding to local curvature of the wing with a radius, with a smaller radius corresponding to increased deflection, and see where the stresses are most likely to cause fractures.
@Victor
It looks like it was a productive MH370 7th Anniversary with all of the new reports and new thinking.
I see at least several points of departure in the narratives emerging from recent news.
(a) Prof Chari/Peter Foley calling for 70-nm search radius.
A hard crash could still be active pilot at some distance from Arc7. Even if the debris suggests hard crash, it does not really answer the active/passive question. If active pilot, then various key assumptions (eg; no pilot maneuvers, etc) come into question.
(b) If it was a hard crash, it is difficult for me to envision how the presumably widely scattered sunken debris would all be missed during the sea bottom searches.
It seems to boil down to two scenarios: either the right wing fell off in a violent dive, or it was a less violent crash, and the right wing hit the surface first. In the latter case that could be passive pilot with the aircraft taking a longer semi-glide to the water surface. In that case searching wider from 34S may make sense. Also in that case, now we possibly have a less scattered debris field (could have been missed).
@ALSM, DonT, Tom Kenyon
Thank you for your extensive documentation and considered analysis.
@Victor
Concerning an exploration into “the spoiler separat[ing] due to bending of the rear wing spar”“.
Not only the spoiler, the flaperon, the outboard flap also.
@Don Thompson: Sure. Maybe Tom can start with the flaperon, where opposing moments are applied at two locations rather than displacements along a curve at three.
I have been following mh370 through this and Wise’s blog from the start. I have just finished the de Changy book and she presents a very compelling complete case.
I was wondering can AWACS effectively electronically hide a plane in flight?
According to MH370 Factual Report, MAS was relaying location to HCM ATCC. Good night message was at 0119. Last message on Factual Report at 0233 MAS gave location to HCM of N14.9 E109, off the northeast coast of Vietnam approaching China claimed territorial waters. This location lines up with McKays sighting. Search was originally begun in this area and then moved to gulf and finally to India Ocean. Why? I think China was about to collect some valuable artifacts held in cargo on MH370 and someone didn’t want to let that happen. Where is it now?
@Trip: If you prefer to throw out the strongest evidence we have (radar captures, satellite data, debris) in favor of speculation and misunderstanding of facts, then FdC’s book is a gold mine. Do you really believe there was a multi-national conspiracy to fabricate evidence and hide the true evidence?
@Trip, Sorry, but NO. AWACS or any other jammer cannot “cloak” a plane. Only in Star Trek. It’s possible to jam a receiver, but in this case that would disrupt all ATC comms, and we know that other planes had no issues contacting ATC. The French military expert vid posted above thoroughly debunks the fiction of having two AWACS planes “sandwiching” MH370 in the wee hours over Vietnam. The distance from eyewitness McKay on the oil rig to FDC’s shootout over Vietnam is much farther over the horizon than even a fire at IGARI. Please beware of getting caught up in the fictional conspiracies promoted in the FDC book.
@Trip,
I’m sure FdC will be pleased to see that at least one reader fell ‘hook-line-and-sinker’ for the tale.
The proposition for AWACS is an unfounded extrapolation, in a literal sense rather than reality, that any ‘AWACS’ were in the SCS area & perhaps even involved in the Cope Tiger multi-nation exercise. That conjecture is also tenuously linked with some radar information, alleged to be sourced from a site north of Bangkok. Information that alleges a number of USAF & RSAF aircraft to have been surveilled within the site’s range. Oddly, no positions or times are attributed to aircraft identified in this radar information, odd given that the function of radar is to determine position & time of sighting. Tenuous, as the noted aircraft include those expected to be positioning to and operating at RTAF ‘Korat’.
Can an AWACS ‘electronically hide a plane in flight’ – are you really interested in the answer? If so, the appropriate acronyms might be EW or ECM, less so AWACS.
Some facts: Cope Tiger 2014 was held at RTAF Nakhon Ratchasima, aka ‘Korat’. That location is some 200km NE of the locality alleged as the source of FdC’s radar data. The planned, and the tale’s contrived, routes for 9M-MRO were some 650km SE from RTAF ‘Korat’ & two national boundaries distant. Cope Tiger 2014 operations began, proper, on 9th March. RSAF G-550 AEW-C aircaft contributed the ‘AWACS’ function to Cope Tiger 2014, not US E-3B Sentry’s. Perhaps the suggestion is that RAF E-3D Sentry’s were involved or the Armée de l’Air E-3F or NATO’s E-3s? But, of course, info-ops planted all this information after the fact so as to cover up the deadly deed.
I have read the book, thoroughly. I found no evidence of what a reader might commonly expect as ‘investigative journalism’ if that reader expects the endeavour to produce an analysis that can be tested as verifiable information, i.e. trustworthy. It’s a collection of specious ideas that simply have no basis in reality. If collating and editing such material is regarded, in this era, as ‘investigative journalism’, the profession has a problem.
Two examples where the investigative pursuit failed: a) to establish why mangosteen fruit might be shipped out of Malaysia in the ‘off season’; b) to understand procedures applicable to the shipment originating at Motorola in Penang. The intent was to perpetuate intrigue, not investigate explanations.
@Trip: I too read FdC’s book. It is 100% nonsense. I’ve never read a book on 370 (or anything else for that matter) that was based on such a ridiculous foundational assumption. She states in the Foreword on page 1:
*”It was not possible in 2014 for a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people to have simply disappeared.”*
That was her starting assumption. Everything in the book that followed was fabricated BS because of this ridiculous starting assumption. She systematically blew off all the real verifiable information because none of it fit her wrong headed alternative universe. Her book is a book of pure fiction.
I appreciate all of your comments. I know this has been a place for serious dialogue. Since the plane has yet to be found, what is a prioritized list of what you accept as facts. It would seem everything to Igari would be true. How would you place everything else. For example, do you accept the ATC transcript? Is the turn possible? Do you believe the radar tracking? What about sightings on the peninsula? Tracking up the Straits? ACARS coming back in without an identifier? Inmarsat hack? Cargo list? Zaharie’s state of mind? Intent of Russian and Ukrainian passengers? What are the weak links in the chain? I have a hard time believing that the plane is being flown in to the middle of the Indian Ocean for suicide.
@Trip,
Let me “do a Florence de Changy” on you.
Disclaimer: I have not read the book.
You write:
“I have a hard time believing that the plane is being flown in to the middle of the Indian Ocean for suicide.”
Yes, that is hard to stomach.
But, let’s consider that some event occurred which caused cabin depressurisation and interference to electrical systems including communications.
Let’s say a professional pilot attempted to return but became more and more dispirited (dis-oriented in the mind, if you wish) as time went on knowing he was alone in a death ridden aircraft.
Would the pilot finally turn along a known route above water between land masses in an attempt to reconcile in his mind what had occurred.
Would that proud pilot then decide he wanted nothing of returning to what he now foresaw as being returning to ridicule and shame, far apart from the risk of doing more damage if the aircraft came down in a populated area in the attempt to return and land.
Would that pilot attempt a flight and flight path not likely to cause any more damage (including such as flying into any other aircraft likely to be on known routes) and then send his aircraft onwards to oblivion.
You can see that there are many reasons to search for and find that aircraft.
@Viking @Arto L,
My apologies – The second link to a 47MB animation of METEOSAT7 was incorrect.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_2a14IZiohulfI5xleu7fdrlGykSAp4o/view
@Trip
The “5 pillars” of proof for the flight path to the SIO are:
(1) Military Radar
(2) Civil Radar
(3) FO Cell Phone Connect at Penang
(4) Inmarsat satellite Data/Data Logs
(5) Debris finds in the SIO
Pillar 6-possible – Might have been eyewitness at Pulak Perak mentioned in the leaked RMP report but details are undisclosed.
Those top 5 are all accepted/verified as quality data, with no credible reason to suspect fraud or hacking. We know Malaysia is holding some data/info back, so we do not have complete disclosure, but in general, as more data becomes disclosed, it is almost always consistent with the SIO hypothesis. The SIO hypothesis has stood the test of time since PM Razak first disclosed the flight ended in the SIO on 24-March-2014.
@Trip: Responding to your questions:
do you accept the ATC transcript?
There’s no reason not to accept it.
Is the turn possible?
Not only possible, but possible with the autopilot engaged.
Do you believe the radar tracking?…Tracking up the Straits?
I have high confidence in the civilian primary radar data and the “Lido Hotel” image of the military radar in the Malacca Strait. I believe the military radar data of the turn at IGARI is qualitatively correct, but the data was sparse and imprecise due to range limitations.
What about sightings on the peninsula?
Eye witness reports have been so conflicting that I place little value on any of them.
ACARS coming back in without an identifier?
I think you are referring to the SATCOM log-on at 18:25. The Flight ID can be manually deleted via the FMC. However, the ICAO ID was present.
Inmarsat hack?
I considered this a possibility before debris was discovered and before the flight to the SIO was found on the captain’s computer. At this point, there is no reason to believe this occurred.
Cargo list?
I have no reason to doubt it.
Zaharie’s state of mind?
We can only speculate.
Intent of Russian and Ukrainian passengers?
It’s possible the reason for their trip to Beijing was for less than honorable reasons, but we have no actual evidence of this, and we have ZERO evidence that the Russian or the Ukrainians were involved with the disappearance.
I have a hard time believing that the plane is being flown in to the middle of the Indian Ocean for suicide.
We can’t be sure of the reason for the diversion to the SIO. At this point I accept that he probably intended to achieve what he did achieve: Flying to a destination difficult to determine in a way that makes it difficult to find the plane.
@Victor said:
“I think K S Narendran (Naren) has it right in his most recent blog post:”
https://linesabouttimes.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/mh370-seven-years-on-all-quiet-on-the-search-front/
Very poignant, and another cricket analogy comes to mind. A “sticky wicket” is the problem for Malaysia.
@370Location:
You can find already processed and zoomed in METEOSAT7 images for the relevant areas from March 8th 00:00 to 02:00 in Tim Vasquez’s site
http://www.weathergraphics.com/malaysia/iozooms.shtml
I’ve found one possible contrail shadow from these images at about 25.9S 99E. It is most prominent in the 00:30 image and some trace of it also appears to be present in the 01:00 image. I am a bit suspicious of this find, however, because the contrast seems to be bit too good for contrails, which should be barely visible in these images at best given the limitations of METEOSAT7’s cameras and the fact that the satellite was at geostationary orbit (it has since been decommissioned and deorbited). The feature might be just a shadow of an unusually linear shape cirrus cloud. It is at perfect location and orientation just west of the plane’s flight path for my candidate route towards YZPG (7th arc crossing at 27.55S 100.17E).
@All:
I’ve learned that Dennis Workman passed away last weekend in a fatal motorcycle accident.
My deepest sympathies to his family and friends, including his partner Ami and his daughter Julie.
I was recently contacted by Vincent Lyne who has been investigating the MH370 disappearance and has a theory and an associated impact point. I suggested he submit a comment here and solicit input. He responded by sending me a summary of his theory with embedded links to background research reports. You can download his theory here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zoaa4ebckvre1cv/2021-03-09%20Vincent%20Lyne%20Theory.pdf?dl=0
I’ve learned that Dennis Workman passed away last weekend in a fatal motorcycle accident.
Oh, Jesus! That is tragic news and I’m very sad indeed to hear it. In case you are in touch with his family. Please pass on sincere condolences.
Vincent Lyne’s final report, which encompasses and updates the previous reports, can be found here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349029540_Unravelled_Cryptic_Pathways_of_MH370-Goodbye_and_Travel-Path_Secrecy_Reveals_Landing_Details_and_Precise_Location_Final_of_4_Iterative_Reports
He indicated that a version of his work has been submitted to Nature.
His basic premise is that fuel exhaustion occurred later than the 7th arc, and using hydroacoustics, locates the debris field to a deep hole to the east of the 7th arc at 33S latitude and the “Penang longitude”.
(Independent of his analysis of the acoustics, his estimate that the logon at 00:19 might be due to manual deployment of the RAT is incorrect. Also, his claim that the in BFO at 00:19 could be due to a change in direction is incorrect.)
@Victor
I share your condolences re: Dennis Workman he will be missed in the MH370 discussions.
@Victor
Vincent Lane’s pin location is in good agreement with my thinking. I would say pilot was active at Arc7 and the reboot was either accident or intentional result of managing the aircraft fuel/electrical config etc. I also think that location is consistent with Dr Chari re: drift, as well as general direction of the home simulator path. It is similar to DrB’s 2018 pin flying a CMT181 path, except that the aircraft keeps flying.
My current effort is to try to understand how far MH370 could go in theory, if it went that direction.
apology Vincent Lyne (spelling)
@Victor,
sad to hear about DennisW’s passing. Will miss his pithy comments here.
I can’t find his obit anywhere online.
What are the chances of this happening on the 7th anniversary MH370?
Was it a single vehicle accident?
@CanisMagnus: I don’t have any other information. I also searched for his name and also for recent motorcycle accidents in California but came up empty.
I’m saddened to hear of Dennis’ death.
It would’ve been a pleasure to have met him in person. I reach out my sympathy to Ami, Julie and those close.
@Victor, @All:
Just finished reading Vincent Lyne’s report. There are several problems with the proposed flight path, such as insufficient fuel if the path goes around JORN Laverton coverage, no explanation for the satcom log-on at 00:19, etc. The hydroacoustic analysis is interesting though.
I was under assumption that underwater sounds would only be detectable over such long distances if they are conducted to the SOFAR channel near their origin. Lyne’s report suggests that sounds originating at or near the seabed could travel along the ocean floor very long distances at much faster speed with little attenuation, and then be conducted to SOFAR channel from coasts, seamounts or shallows reaching up to the SOFAR depth? If this is indeed possible, it could be a good idea to revisit the acoustic data and see if any of the detected events could be traced to the previously identified candidate points of impact assuming this kind of sound propagation.
R.I.P Dennis Workman. My condolences to his family and friends.
Sad to hear about Dennis Workman. He was a big reason that I continue to read this blog. I have come to respect his opinion and always enjoyed his ‘distilled perspective’. R.I.P.
@Victor – Sorry to hear about Dennis W. He definitely made the analysis and contributions presented by different contributors a thought provoking read with his very experienced and forthright feedback. Please kindly share condolences from readers of this blog as well to his family.
@Victor Iannello
That is very sad news regarding Dennis.
Tragic news regarding Dennis W. My deepest sympathies to his family and friends.
@370Location
Many thanks for uploading the following minutes of signal from XMIS. At first glance I could not see anything, but after a second look, there is perhaps a faint Doppler shifted signal at 57:30 at around 12Hz. What do you think?
By the way, have you tried to investigate correlations between the two seismic detectors?
@Arto L
I still think the contrail passing directly over CI comes from SE and is going NW. Both contrails are intermittent and quite weak, so it takes carefull work to follow them. I suggest you try putting a transparent ruler over the pictures to guide the eye and link the individual segments.
@ALL
Extremely tragic to hear about Dennis W. He made a large number of important contributions.
@DennisW,
Rest In Peace, fellow enthusiast of many things.
April and I will be thinking of you and Ami whenever I ride my 2005 BMW (Dakar).
— Ed
@Viking,
The is a faint blip around 12 Hz near 23:57:30, but notice that there are intermittent blips at the same frequency across the plot. It’s more likely a nearby well pump, aor AC compressor, but probably not cars running over a cattle grate.
I have indeed tried correlating the XMIS and XMI seismometers. The match up and point toward loud events like quakes. The also correlate on what must be waves crashing on beaches. In the case of a flyby, I suspect that they would each see a different origin for the sound. I’ll try digging out the old MATLAB code.
I’ve spent some hours running a contrast enhancement on the three bands of METEOSAT7 data. (CLAHE, or contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization). The full dataset is several GB (5k by 5k, 86 frames). I’ve tried cropping out an area to match your Youtube vid, around 00:00Z, which is much smaller. There are some severe distortions in your vid image, probably caused by remapping to an orthogonal grid. I don’t see your contrail, but would be happy to get you the data. An animated .gif of each channel is lossless, though not useful for viewing. I keep the data as multichannel multiframe .tif files. I could also export to a lossless vid format. Do you have tools to import and single step through such a file? Any preferred format?
@Don,
I remember doing an hour+ plot of the II.DGAR seismometer to listen for any landings/takeoff related to a specific flight. Part of the recollection is the amusing origin of the waypoint names near the air base. Using the site search here reveals nothing, and Google isn’t index it either. I’ll dig deeper.
@370Location:
Perhaps you are referring to this comment?
https://mh370.radiantphysics.com/2020/03/09/new-report-released-for-mh370-search/#comment-28595
@TBill
”It seems to boil down to two scenarios: either the right wing fell off in a violent dive, or it was a less violent crash, and the right wing hit the surface first. In the latter case that could be passive pilot with the aircraft taking a longer semi-glide to the water surface. In that case searching wider from 34S may make sense.”
At the moment, I suspect the pilot(s) (whoever) noticed that Satcom came back online on their screen, then pulled up, glided and hit the ocean left wing first. As a result, the left wing was shredded to pieces, and only the left outboard flap trailing edge survived (its hole may indicate the flap was hit by something else first), the right wing is in a comparatively better shape, the flaperon (and other parts) came off on impact, as the French report claims. The fuselage broke up but was not shredded to pieces, the surviving pieces are from near the fracture.
@Victor,
Yes, thanks for finding that discussion on tracking a Mar 7 Omni flight at DGAR.
@Don,
Here’s the matching stereo audio to listen along while looking at the plot:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/109sCZd159BJxtFs1rDh9kTpj9asit332/view
@Nederland
A pleasure to hear from you.
OK, I like it.
@TBill
I just think that the more wing pieces turn up that can obviously not have come off on impact in a descent at very high speed, the less likely it gets that virtually all of these separated midair instead (they otherwise would need to come off one after another, Boeing wouldn’t like that one either). Those pieces still indicate a violent impact, but not at the speed suggested by the final BFOs.
But I agree, if true, this wouldn’t be of much help in narrowing down the search area.
Hi,
Is there any technical paper to elaborate on Foley’s recommendation?
Thanks…
@Sid Bennett: Which recommendation of Pete Foley?
@VictorI
Previously there was mention of new studies that would justify a search and the 70nm search band….
Posting a redacted/edited version of my review. Please delete the 3/10 @0801 original.
@Victor, @TBill, @Arto L, Re Lyne Location
I too have now read through Vincent Lyne’s reports. It’s unfortunate that he depends on the hydroacoustics of a particular signal as a major component of his candidate, because he makes several faulty assumptions.
In his first three reports he is focused on a single hydrophone near Rottnest in Perth Canyon. He says it is the closest hydrophone and so should have the clearest signal. In fact, the Rottnest site is on a shallow ridge above the canyon. The H01 Array at Cape Leeuwin is closer, and positioned at SOFAR depth to detect those signals.
Lyne makes the same mistake of others in the past, selecting a signal from someone else’s research, and trying to use the timing to only a single hydrophone. In this case, the H01 array had a clear bearing toward the signal source of 301.6 degrees. He tries to use the difference between a Maldives origin (which he picked as where the 301.6 bearing crossed the Maldives chain, not anyone else’s estimates), and what he poorly estimates as the time to his Lyne Location PB. It’s not a useful calculation. Even if he had ignored the 301.6 bearing and estimated the triangulation timing, he would have seen his error. The actual time difference of arrival (TDOA) between first Rottnest and then H01 is 65 seconds. Modeled to his Maldives site is 67.8s. Since H01 is actually closer, the modeled TDOA for his Lyne Location PB is -61.9 sec, over two minutes off, and in the wrong direction.
Lyne summarizes his third paper by setting a top priority of looking up details on other hydrophones and examining triangulation. Quote: “Final Comment – Let’s do this! Dig out and analyze those hydroacoustic records in preparation for the final search!”
Between Jan 21 and Feb 3, he apparently did some searching and checking. He probably saw the problem with the bearing and triangulation. He mentions reading about a Gulden Draak analysis. That would have been my own work, but he clearly never found my website. Simon Gunson had posted my acoustic map of a weak Gulden Draak signal to a conspiracy site (uncredited). It’s probably still easier to find that on the web than my website. His second source of MH370 acoustics was unfortunately the papers by Dr Usama Kadri. Lyne took those as gospel, including the concept of AGW waves traveling at high speed along the seabed, and the miscalculated bearing from the Diego Garcia H08 array toward a strong 01:59:20 (not 1:58) as being from Madagascar. That signal points to the Java Anomaly – the basis for my candidate. Curtin actually published the correct bearing toward the 1:59:20 signal in their ATSB report, but unfortunately dismissed it as a weak geological event because it was nowhere near the active search area.
As Lyne realizes that a direct path to the hydrophones is a mismatch for his candidate, he attempts to use the AGW theory and some creative physics to match the three hydrophones he knows of to the same signal origin. He has one path from his deep water implosion following the seafloor at high speeds west to Madagascar, then into the SOFAR channel to H08 (but still too fast). Since he was misled by Kadri to Madagascar, that path can be dismissed. Also, it would require crossing the SW Indian Ridge, which has series of shallows that would probably block the signal. Not to mention that Kadri’s 241 deg bearing from H08 intersects the broad Nazareth Bank, with depths from 0-200 m that would completely block any SOFAR paths.
Lyne then posits that his sound from the deep side of Broken Ridge would somehow go up and over the ridge and back down, somehow getting into the SOFAR channel towards Batavia Seamount. Batavia is just N of where the 301.6 bearing from H01 crosses the 7th arc. On the correct bearing past Batavia, depths are never shallower than 2200m. The SOFAR channel depth in that area is 1200m, and somewhat broad. The crest of Batavia is around 1550m, but farther north on bearing 298, and not at an angle to reflect from S back SE toward the hydrophones. This is very strange physics. Very low frequencies can travel outside the SOFAR channel, but those were filtered out by Curtin as they give poor bearing resolution. Reflection off of a shallow coastline appears common, as I have reported with upslope then downslope T-wave conversion. This probably requires very shallow water less than 200m deep near a coastal shelf. The crest of Broken Ridge near the Lyne Location is 1000m, and the reflection would be southward. Even if there were a path to Batavia seamount, it would not be reflecting SOFAR signals back SE.
Lyne spends much of the fourth and final paper plotting seafloor depth contours and maps, but all as extrapolations from Kadri’s misleading claims. He even gets into a variant of Kadri talking about military ops interference and missing data gaps, with Lyne saying that embargoed H08 data is being held at the military base. In fact, it was all delivered in real time to the UN CTBTO data center in Vienna, Austria, except for a brief outage 3 hours after the last ping. Lyne also adds an unreferenced claim the H08 signal was considered at some point as a nuclear blast.
There is so much hand waving about sound speeds and propagation that it’s difficult to pin down his calculations. I ran his locations through my own fairly accurate models. Checking the Batavia Seamount as a reflection point for any signal matching the Curtin triangulation, I get a TDOA of 58.6s, with a difference from the actual 65s TDOA of 6.4 sec. His Maldives guess site has a TDOA of 67.8 sec, so triangulation of those two hydrophones alone shows the source is closer to the Maldives.
Lyne says the Maldives origin of the Curtin signal was based on an 00:19:37 origin, but there is no basis for that. Incidentally, there was a very similar signal to the Curtin event arriving a day earlier from around the same bearing. Whatever the origin of those signals, it was unlikely MH370.
I don’t think there’s validity to any of Vincent Lyne’s claims about the acoustic origin (except that there could have been an implosion of something like gas cylinders).
[At Ed Anderson’s request, I have removed the comment that he submitted on March 10 at 08:01.]
Tragic news regarding Dennis. Like others here, I am saddened by his passing. His insights, and the “flavor” of some of his remarks, will be sadly missed. My condolences to Ami and the family.
Victor, could you be kind enough to explain why all current modeling efforts do not treat pilot input as a stationary random process? The first part of the flight allows to characterize the distribution of time intervals between control inputs, why would we assume that there would be a shift to this distribution parameters after FMT? Psychology aside. In other words, what evidence do we have for sudden cessation of active piloting post-FMT? Just the magick of a linear fit to BFO? That graph is severely low pass filtered by hour-long sampling interval.
Sincerely yours, Kirill
As someone who codes in Fortran for a living, i think a good way forward with hard data (not remote-sensing/acoustics etc) would be in producing a posterior distribution of locations at last ping via filtering sample paths produced by random flight control sequences through BTO/fuel usage(integral)/BFO(local) constraint set. This random control sequence timing should respect the empirical distribution (of Poisson variety or so) for the radar-covered part. some day i might get to code this up using your and Ulich work – too much domain knowledge needed even to parse your spreadsheets. Just popped in for the 7 year date. Sad to hear about DennisW, he’d love some randomness.
@370Location:
Thanks for the review about Lyne’s reports. No doubt you could go on and on. For example the speed of the AGW from his impact location to Madagaskar coast seems to be arbitrarily taken so that the arrival time to H08 matches the arrival times to H01 and Perth Canyon. Also there is no explanation why there is reflection from Batavia, but nothing from Gulden Draak. Kadri’s theory of AGWs is interesting and should be taken into account in sound propagation in deep ocean, but I don’t think Lyne’s analysis is useful as proof for the point of impact or late implosion.
@Viking:
Yes. I can see the contrail passing over XMAS Island. It appears stronger NW of the island, so I think you are right about that aircraft’s heading. I still can’t find the other contrail you mentioned though.
What are your thought of the possible contrail shadow at about 25.9S 99E (most clearly visible in the 00:30 image)? I think it appears a bit too strong to be a contrail, but its location and orientation is interesting and fits well with my theoretical flight path.
@370 Location
Ed, profuse apologies. I mistakenly applied a local to UTC correction to the Omni Air reporting times. BUMMR, indeed.
The aircraft exited the Male FIR, southbound via waypoint BUMMR, at 10:20UTC and, after turnaround it re-entered the Male FIR, northbound via waypoint BUMMR, at 1419UTC.
Nothing, that one of the island’s electricity generating plants is located close to the DGAR facility.
@Kirill: Both the BFO and BTO from 19:41 show a progression consistent with a “straight-ish” path, but there is nothing that precludes maneuvers.
As you probably recall, the DSTG published its Bayesian analysis which reconstructed paths with random maneuvers, i.e., changes in speed, track, and altitude. The hotspot on the 7th arc was around 38S, which corresponded to a “straight” path after the turn to the south between 18:28 and 18:40. It is true, however, that the prior distribution on the number of maneuvers favored paths with fewer maneuvers, i.e., there was a penalty for each maneuver.
In an opinion piece for the New Strait Times, a former line pilot and Director of Operations for MAS believes we should “forget the whole thing and move forward”, and stop accusing the captain.
@Victor
I have seen some other writings by Capt Bakar and he is obviously knowledgeable and well spoken. But he is in conflict with another senior MAS pilot, often in the MH370 documentaries, who concludes the pilot must have done it. I think Capt Bakar voices the position, probably popular in that part of the world, that for reasons of human dignity, it is better to sweep this under the carpet than disclose the known truths and search for the aircraft.
What I would ask is: What did the draft MH370 SIR report, that I believe was circ’ed to all the parties (OZ, USA, China, etc) say? My understanding is that it listed possible causes such as pijacking and cargo issues. After the regime change to Mahathir, there was an apparent edit.
I believe that is what Tony Abbott was trying to say last year, if Malaysia insists on hiding the truth, then the partner countries can say what they know (like disclosing the complete simulator data).
Tony Abbott already shouted from the mountaintop that Malaysia told him it was mass murder/suicide, which until Abbott used those words, I never did. France, USA seem to feel that way too…if you ask me.
@TBill: The SIR team believed there were no indications of a system failure, which led them to suggest this was an intentional diversion. However, the RMP report already had exonerated the captain, so the SIR team had to introduce the possibility of “third-party” intervention without any further explanation about who, how, or why.
I’ve talked to many people close to the official investigation. I have yet to hear any of them propose a scenario they think is likely other than a diversion by the captain, although some prefer to remain silent on the matter.
@Victor
Reading between the lines, I feel the current PM might be receptive to searching for MH370 if he has the opportunity. But there could be opposition to that more open approach, which we are hearing voiced above.
Over on Reddit, @LabRatSR suggests OI is not the same company anymore, capability wise. So I don’t know how much opportunity there really is. Also we can see Malaysia’s support for resolving the matter is probably not unanimous.
@TBill: I’ve seen zero evidence that Malaysia is interested in resuming the search. The bar for “credible new evidence” will be high, and Malaysia is not even interested in retrieving the most recent debris finds. What I hear in the public statements are nice words with no commitment.
I think OI remains interested in restarting the search, but there are the realities of business interests and logistics. It would not surprise me if they are unable and/or unwilling to search this upcoming season. I think they have already made a large investment in a high-risk search, so it is hard to fault them for whatever they decide to do.
Dennis Workman, may you rest in peace.
May your nearest and dearest find some solace in the smiles you often brought to others in various parts of the world.
@Arto L:
I am very happy you now agree on the direction of the contrail through the CI airport. I am sorry it takes a lot of effort to find the second one south of CI, but I can assure you it is there. In some places, it is only visible as a shadow on cloud layer below. In other places, it appears directly in small areas with clear sky below.
Concerning the possibility of contrails further south, I did see one around 18 S. I do not remember its exact position, since I focused on signals near Christmas Island. I did not look below 20 S.
@370Location:
Concerning my YouTube video, it is for illustration only, not for precision and scientific application, and made quickly. It bases itself on a user-unfriendly version without most of the problems you correctly point out, but with poor illustration quality, in particular for non-experts. I am considering making a new one within the next few months. Unfortunately, I do not have appropriate software for the formats you propose, and the person who helped me making the illustrative version is very busy the next 2-3 months. However, he has promised me help with an improved version.
For the signal near 23:51:50, I realized that in addition to the intense high frequency signal with inverse-chirp it also has a Doppler feature centered around 4.5 Hz. This feature is visible in both detectors (XMI and XMIS). It shows a very large Doppler shift consistent with an airplane passing extremely close to both detectors. Since there is effectively no time-delay between the two detectors, the airplane must be passing roughly perpendicular to the line between them. This is in nice qualitative agreement with the contrail from SE to NW passing over the airport.
I then took a more detailed look at the seismic signals. Initially, I convinced myself that the transmission must go exclusively through air until the sound-pressure hits the ground around the detector (exactly as you said – thanks for your input). Then, I derived an analytical formula for the Doppler-shifting curves based on this model. From this formula, it is possible to extract the distance between the detector and the closest passage of the airplane for known airplane speed. For the signal around 23:51:50, I get a minimum distance of 17+/-3 km for XMIS and 13.5+/-3 km for XMI, probably dominated by the flying height. In principle this distance can also be calculated from the exact passage time, but since it is impossible to derive from the contrail with better than 15 s precision, this gives an uncertainty around 50%. However, the number still qualitatively confirms the minimum distances derived from the Doppler shifts.
I think the combination of a nice fit with the absolute time (23:51:50), the minimum distance, and the route going perpendicular to the line between the detectors and nearest to XMI is close to a proof that this seismic signal comes from the airplane generating the contrail through the airport. More importantly, it proves that it is actually a contrail and not something else.
Concerning the low frequency for the Doppler shifted part of the signal in combination with a clear contrail it indicates a large and heavy airplane. Since it is still able to fly around 830km/h, it must be a modern airplane with large engine power. These details are consistent with an A380, but not a proof.
For the other seismic signal at 23:57:30, I took extra care in the analysis. First, I measured the minimum distance between XMIS and the contrail using Google maps, and added the contribution from the estimated height using Pythagoras (contributes only 2%). The result is 52 km with an uncertainty of +/-0.5 km from the uncertainty of the exact contrail position. Since the speed measured from the contrail is in good agreement with the one from my model for MH370 (less than 2% off), I used the model speed in the calculations. When doing so, the peak time of the signal strength at XMIS agrees with expectations (from the contrail) with a precision better than 2 seconds, corresponding to a distance of 52.6 km. This is within the measurement uncertainty.
More importantly, it is also possible to extract the minimum distance from the shape of the Doppler shifting curve using my formula. Here the agreement is of comparable quality. The result is only off by 3%. In detail, I get a best-fit minimum distance of 50.5 km+/-2.5 km from the Doppler shifting. Here the uncertainty is predominantly from the thickness of the signal-curve.
I think a precision-agreement of this kind from three independent approaches is simply impossible unless the seismic signal and the contrail have the same origin. However, I lack one detail to make it a complete proof. If I can find the signal in XMI, and the expected delay fits, there is essentially no room left for error in the confirmation of the contrail.
Therefore, I hope you can find time to make the XMI signal available for the same time window as XMIS after the earthquake.
@Don, I will run the DG seismic plots with the new time frames, but it may be a while. There has been an unexpected non-covid death in my own family, and that now takes priority.
@Viking,
Likewise, I can’t concentrate on doppler calculations for a bit. I had already done the METEOSAT-7 contrast enhancement, so here are the files:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1R_Kokhpe5nY_rgYp7GKmAGpciPtZBRd8
I’d planned to paste them up into a filmstrip, but simply exported them as individual images. They cover 11 frames plus a map overlay for each of Visible, IR (3.6 micron), and WaterVapor (10.8 micron) wavelengths. I include an inverted (like a photo negative) set for each channel, because the IR and WV channels are showing thermal emission blocked by clouds. Inverting them is a closer match to visible light, with white clouds instead of black.
The sequences cover the time period from Mar 7 @ 22:00 to Mar 8 @ 03:00 UTC in 30 minute samples. Before this there is a daily 1900-2130 blackout, presumably when the sat loses power.
You probably already know this from your timing estimate, but the satellite spins at 100 RPM, with the telescope scanning from S to N poles for 25 min, then a 5 min retrace. The full image height is 2500 pixels, withe the globe measuring 2400. (Sorry, the resolution of IR and WV is half that of VIS. I thought I was using the 5K rez file There may be better definition available for VIS). I figure the pixel count from 90S to 10.5S near XMIS is 950 pixels, which would put the scan time at XMIS about 9:54 (594s) after each preceding half hour mark. Reason being, the timestamps on the file are for the finished scan. You could also just subtract 20 minutes from the timestamp for that latitude.
For more explanation of the three METEOSAT-7 MTP bands, this site has some info:
http://www.eumetrain.org/IntGuide/
http://www.eumetrain.org/IntGuide/PowerPoints/Channels/MTP_to_MSG.ppt
The .ppt presentation notes that fine ice crystals in contrails may be most visible in the 3.6 micron band.
You should be able to zoom in on these .png files with any decent image viewer.
If you have a stereo image viewer, try putting, say, VIS and WV-inverted side by side. You will see an interesting 3D effect, and contrails might be a unique 3D layer.
(I personally don’t see them).
I highly recommend the free open source ImageJ package maintained by the US NIH. Especially for general scientific and image analysis, Fiji is a packaged ImageJ distribution that includes dozens of contributed plugins. It also happens to be like a Rosetta stone for various image formats, and can handle stacked image planes for MRI radiography. It’s Java code, with packaged binaries for Win/MacOS/Linux. It also keeps itself up to date. I did the contrast enhancement with this software.
https://imagej.net/Fiji
If you want to point out a particular contrail candidate, you can tell me the pixel x/y coords in these images. If a contrail is visible before 23:40 at XMIS, then it’s probably too early. I’ve taken a much wider snapshot of the SIO, in case anyone else wants to explore. Still, the 72 680×1024 .png files total only 30MB.
— Ed
@370Location:
Sorry to hear about your loss. I think your files will be very helpful when I try to make an improved illustration video, but it will take some time before I can get help.
For a slightly different reason (looking for possible debris) I am interested in the visible METEOSAT7 pictures areound my proposed end position for the following days – in particular during day-time periods with clear sky. Do you know where I can download them? I briefy checked NASA satellites. The weather is generally good with a few drifting clouds, but the NASA picture resolution is completely inadequate.
I hope you can find a lttle time to make the XMI spectrum available, but just take it easy and focus on your family first.
@370Location: Ed, I am also sorry for your loss.
@Victor, @Viking, and All, thanks for your concern.
@Viking,
METEOSAT-7 has very poor resolution, since it covers the hemisphere. The advantage is the frequent scans.
I registered here: https://www.eumetsat.int/data-registration
Search their archives, place a (free) order, and you get notified when the download is ready. Beware that you will get a bunch of .tar files in an odd format – maybe OpenMTP. I believe I was able to use Fiji to import the files as raw data by removing the header. I saved them as 16-bit lossless .png files, then stacked them.
Far easier is to look at the MODIS Aqua and Terra satellites that make one or two passes per day. I don’t think you will find any weather or general observation satellites that have sufficient resolution to spot debris, unless you are willing to examine disturbance of the ocean surface by looking a sunglints. A section near the bottom of this page on my site has links to more sunglint info and the sat image browser. Search the page for the “Sunglint Zoom” image. The possibility of the striations in the middle of that image being a debris field is rather compelling.
https://370Location.org/?s=SunGlint
Following that link for Mar 11, 2014 go back to Mar 8 for a sunglint near Andaman Islands on Terra. Also on Terra is a very clear sunglint on Nov 17 2018 off the coast of Jakarta showing the LionAir S&R activity, plus the wake of a very large ship entering the harbor. (Crash site -5.812922, 107.126903)
BTW, I was mistaken about the METEOSAT-7 image band wavelenths. They are:
VIS – VISible: 0.5 – 0.9 micron
IR – InfraRed: 10.5 – 12.5 micron
WV – Water Vapour: centered at 6.3 micron
@370Location:
Thanks for making a lot of extra information available.
@Arto L:
It may help you a bit with the contrails to look in the WV band. Some of the missing segments in the Visible band can be seen there. However, it helps most for the SE-NW contrail. Originally I did not look in any of the other bands, since I suspected that diffraction and worse signal/noise would make this practically useless, but it works better than I thought. However, the contrails are broader, so for precision work it is not perfect.
At the same time I took a new look around 18 S. I think there are 3 contrails, but none of them are near 7th arc. Two comes out of Learmouth and go north (no surprice, and certainly unrelated to MH370). One is far out to sea, and I have no idea what it is (certainly also unrelated to MH370).
Finally, I took a quick look around 25 S. Unfortunately I think it is a cloud formation. However, I did not do a careful analysis, so this first impression comes with significant uncertainty.
@370Location:
Sorry for your loss.
You are correct that METEOSAT7 had poor resolution. It was in geostationary orbit and its cameras were designed to observe weather systems. The resolution is only about 2 km/pixel, which was sufficient for its intended purpose. Contrails or their shadows might still be visible in these images anyway in the right conditions (high contrast).
The possible contrail shadow I found is at 233/750 (x/y) in your images. It is best visible in 00:30 visual image. There may be a faint dark trace of it also in IR. It being dark (cold) means this is really a shadow of something on the cloud below. Could be a contrail, could be an unusually linear cirrus cloud.
Unfortunately it seems no satellite in low Earth orbit happened to pass by the area in the early hours that morning. By the time the area was imaged later on March 8th any contrails there would have long since dissipated.
@Viking:
I agree with Ed that it is unlikely any debris would be visible in the satellite images. The resolutions of cameras that are meant to image large areas are just not good enough and the operators of the satellites with capabilities to image small areas with high resolution would have had to know where to look immediately after the crash. That said, I recall there were some unconfirmed detections of debris south of the 7th arc a few weeks after the crash, but that was probably just junk that had fallen off cargo ships and ended up in the southern circumpolar current.
@370Location and Arto L
I agree that direct detection of debris in METEOSAT7 pictures is not possible. However, in the past I did already try to look for Sunglint and similar effects in some general-purpose NASA satellite pictures. I had no success, since the resolution was typically 10-20 km or worse.
I also tried to look at ESA satellites. All staff members at EU universities can register and freely download pictures. I did register, but unfortunately the good stuff only starts in 2016.
However, there may be a slight hope with METEOSAT7. Under perfect conditions the resolution is approaching 1 km (you are right it is typically 2 km). I think this may give some chance to find a medium-sized debris field, – in particular if one knows in which direction (and how fast) it moves.
The only alternative (and last resort) is a spy satellite. However, I have no access to any of those.
Seeing that things are quiet here, I’d like to look at the ‘motive’ side of the investigation of the hijacking of MH370.
FdC’s latest book makes a very intriguing point about the sounds recorded from the cockpit of MH370 prior to the plane going ‘dark’. She wrote on pg.142 “I was told by a different source in Malaysia that there may have been far more information on the original tape than on the version that had been made public. It was even hinted that there were odd noises in the cockpit, and voices possibly speaking in Arabic or some other Middle Eastern language shortly before what was felt to be the end”
There are only 3 well-known languages in the Middle East: Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew.
Did you know that the 2 Iranian passengers who flew on MH370 with false EU passports were actually Christians trying to leave Iran for the West? See link below.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2014/04/01/malaysia-370-iran-family-mourns-sidner-pkg.cnn/video/playlists/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-those-aboard/
Yet, initial reports in Western media failed to mention this fact, and simply portrayed the true nationality of these 2 young men on board the missing flight as sufficient to warrant suspicion.
Just 2 months later in May 2014, The Guardian ran an extensive piece on Christians who leave Iran for the West with false passports, including via Malaysia. Here are some quotes.
Iranian, and occasionally Afghan, émigrés have become emerging faces in what is considered to be waning religious life in Germany. After paying up to $30,000 to be smuggled into the country with fake passports, they’ve taken on western names…
…After the church was dismantled by authorities and arrests took place, she left Iran for Malaysia, where she had worked intermittently as a guide for Iranian tourists. But troubles from back home followed her to the southeast Asian country where Islam is the predominant religion. Iranian authorities frequented the church were refugees attended and filmed members, she says. This prompted her to flee to Berlin
https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/may/12/iran-converted-christians-sanctuary-germany-muslim
@all
On the @CanisMagnusRufus theme, this examines the hypothesis that if Captain Zaharie was responsible for the crash, what might have gone through his mind in planning and have been some of his actions in the flight. By its nature it is speculative though even theories about where the wreckage might lie rely to some degree on assumptions and subjective interpretation.
Its purpose is as a mind-clearer to see what effect that hypothesis would have on underwater wreckage search proposals.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hlzrb4s181c0x05/Possible%20thoughts%20and%20actions%20by%20Captain%20Zaharie.docx?dl=0
@CanisMR: For years I’ve heard rumors about Middle Eastern voices on the audio tapes, yet no evidence has ever surfaced. Considering that the Malaysian investigators proposed that MH370 was diverted by third parties, if there was such evidence, it seems strange that it was withheld. I don’t attach much weight to this rumor.
@VictorI
In an article titled “Missing Jet Recordings May Have Been ‘Edited’: Experts” the audio between pilots of the missing Malaysian jet and air traffic controllers, were edited, voice experts say.
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/missing-jet-recordings-may-have-been-edited-experts-n94941
Perhaps the Malaysians DO want the world to know that the plane was diverted by third parties, but DON’T want to tell the world who it was, and let the world figure out who the likely suspects.
That’s tragic news about Dennis. He’ll be sorely missed. Thoughts and prayers to his family.
@CanisMR: There’s little doubt that the audio recordings were edited and background noises were introduced, as if the released recordings were produced with a microphone re-recording the audio. Whether that’s indicative of anything other than poor workmanship is hard to say. It’s hard to distinguish incompetence from deception.
@CanisMagnusRufus
I hold open that the initial transcripts/sound recordings were edited by Malaysia.
However, what Malaysia seems to be hiding is incriminating evidence re: the Captain ZS. Take the simulator data for example, had the complete sim data been leaked, I believe it would have been damning, and Jeff Wise’s first article would have been explosive. Instead were were belatedly (2 years later) dealing with only a portion of the complete sim data, and that was only after Malaysia orig said the sim data was “nothing sinister”. I feel FBI must have told Malaysia the sim data was incriminating in April_2014. Malaysia has been in cover-up mode from the start, true, but it is probably Malaysian home-grown intrigue being obscured.
As far as “rumors”, there was an interesting recent account by a Malaysian citizen on the MH370 social media. He indicates rumors were flying from the early days, so I just think there was a lot of speculating going on, especially when Razak said it was apparent deliberate diversion. That’s when the pilot-denial theories started being developed in earnest (lightning, fire, etc).
@David
Agree with some things. Missing IFE logon is potentially not so unexplained with active pilot. Once we have active pilot, passive flight theory is questionable. I do not rule out search for deep zone/BR. I think we should use simulator data more than we do- it’s all we have other than radar/sat data- and it suggests active pilot, CI=0, and maybe 180 CMH heading.
@TBill
I used to believe that MH370 was hijacked by the Russians. But after examining closely the events surrounding the shootdown of UIA 752, and MH17, and looking back at Malaysia’s relationship with countries in the Middle-East, I came to a new and sobering conclusion.
MH370 was NOT hijacked by the Russians, and the crew is not to be blamed either. Malaysia brought this tragedy upon itself by its irrational international relations.
@CanisMR: At what time do you believe the cockpit was commandeered?
@Victor,
Based on the information I know, I think the aircraft was commandeered after IGARI, but the would-be hijackers were probably invited on board the cockpit well before the transponder was turned off.
FdC wrote about the Kiwi, Mike Mckay on pg.336 of her book The bottom line was that more than five years after Mike Mckay wrote his email about MH370, was fired from his job and left Vietnam under enormous stress, it was still impossible to talk to him. It really looked as if this man was either under surveillance or under protection – or both. Another thing seemed clear. He had to stay well clear of reporters…. If the fire in the sky that had been seen and described by the 57 yr old New Zealander working on an oil rig right about the time of the loss of contact was not MH370, then what was it?
I believe that what he saw was a military grade parachute flair, either dropped by an aircraft, or launched from the surface of the sea. This happened about 30 minutes after the transponder was turned off at IGARI.
Why was this flair launched?
Was there another aircraft looking for something, possibly debris, on the ocean surface? Or was it a signal to someone? Whatever the case may be, what Mike Mckay saw was definitely related to MH370, and it happened soon after plane went ‘dark’.
The lawsuits launched by the NOK of the MH370 passengers in the USA were consolidated into a MDL class action in the DC 9th circuit, and this MDL was ultimately dismissed by the Democratic party nominated Judge KBJ as forum non conveniens.
A review of this dismissal by another Democratic nominated Judge NR did not result in overturning KBJ’s decision.
During the course of the trials, the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs became fewer and fewer. The lawfirms themselves were located either in the East Coast, Chicago, or Seatle.
In July 2020, the brother of the only American on board MH370 launched a petition in the US Supreme Court requesting that ‘the U.S. Supreme Court … address “disarray” and “confusion” in the lower courts about the deference trial courts owe to U.S. plaintiffs in forum non conveniens determinations.’
On Oct 5, 2020, the petition was denied by SCOTUS.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/20-98.html
I’m not familiar with the workings of the US SCOTUS petition process, but here’s a nice overview.
https://www.counselpress.com/page_blog_single.cfm?bid=11
Here are some interesting points I’ve noticed about this petition.
1. whereas throughout the lower court trials the plaintiffs were represented by East Coast, Chicago, or Seatle based lawyers, the petitioner chose BAKER BOTTS to represent him at the SCOTUS. This lawfirm is based in Houston and has connections to the ‘old’ GoP establishment. It also has connections to ROSNEFT, and thus possibly even the current occupants of the Kremlin.
2. The petition was filed July 27 against the aircraft manufacturer, with a response due Aug 31. The respondent filed a waiver of right to respond on Aug 27 (a Thursday). The petitioner then got a Brief amici curiae of Legal Scholars filed on Aug 31 (the Monday after).
3. On Sep 2, it was distributed for the conference of Sep 29. On Sep 18 the Associate Justice RBG passed away. According to CNN, she was working as late as Sep 11, and her sudden death came as a shock to her staff. Only a few petitions are looked at by the justices but I’m assuming if the plaintiff is represented by a big name GoP-linked law firm, and the respondent is the biggest aircraft manufacturer in the world, I would think that the justices would probably have looked at this petition.
4. On Oct 5, the docket states Petition DENIED. Justice Alito took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition. This would suggest that the other justices did look at the case before denying the petition. Did Alito remove himself out of courtesy to the late RBG, leaving the court evenly balanced between conservative and liberal justices?
@CanisMR: Why do you believe the hijackers were invited into the cockpit? How do you explain the captain’s simulator data showing a flight into the SIO ending in fuel exhaustion?
@CanisMagnusRufus
I believe CNN contributor Mary Schiavo was involved in that MH370 case. The problem they had, they were blaming Boeing for mechanical issue, for which there is none apparent. The lower U.S. court rulings said the aircraft loss is thought due to Malaysian responsibility, which Malaysia in so many words, took the “5th amendment” and dismissed the case.
@TBill: I believe the issue was one of venue. The US courts said the relevant information to be discovered was in Malaysia, not the US. I have heard little from Mary Schiavo that I agree with, as her job is to advocate for her clients, which may or may not intersect with factual conclusions.
@Victor
Agreed. But I would not mind hearing her account of what happened to the court case.
CMR: Mike Mckay did not see MH370. We have known that since the radar data became available, if not well before. It’s basic math. MH370 never went above the horizon (207 nm) from McKay’s position, 303 nm from the point of 370’s closest approach. See illustration here: https://bit.ly/3d3BSrN
As for FdC as a source… she has no clue what happened, and certainly does not know what McKay saw, if anything.
@TBill: According to Reuters, Circuit court Judge Neomi Rao said: while the court “has great sympathy for the victims of this tragedy and their families” she found no reason to reverse the decision. “We conclude that the district court did not clearly abuse its discretion in dismissing appellants’ lawsuits.”
Schiavo tried to implicate Boeing in the disappearance. The US courts wanted to no part of it.
@Victor Iannello
Regarding, ‘… the captain’s simulator data showing a flight into the SIO ending in fuel exhaustion‘, the data does not show that at all.
The data shows that fuel exhaustion occurred sometime before the simulation aircraft was dragged down to the SIO.
Fuel exhaustion for the simulation aircraft almost certainly occurred in the northern hemisphere, likely somewhere near ANOKO – WITT. Fuel exhaustion was likely brought about by the use of the Fuel Jettison system.
After being flown in a fuel exhausted, unpowered state for about a minute and a half the aircraft was then manually relocated (‘dragged’) over 3,000 nm into the SIO.
@Mick Gilbert: Whether the fuel was removed before the position was shifted to the SIO is irrelevant. At the time the simulation was re-started in the SIO, there was no fuel. I have not seen definitive evidence that the fuel was jettisoned, but even if it was, it doesn’t matter. The simulation was re-started in the SIO with no fuel. That is incredibly incriminating.
@Victor
@Mick
Link to my recent paper/interpretation of the sim data is below, I know you you guys have seen it, but posting in case anyone missed it.
The sim data is still undisclosed in its completeness. As such we are not provided the run time in the simulator. However, Mick first discovered the fuel jettison time is consistent with the run time between 10N and 45S1. ATSB confirmed that for Mick, without disclosing the data. I independently started coming to the same conclusion, and asked Mick about it, and he told me what he found out. Yes it is an inference.
However, I would ask (1) why is Malaysia hiding the complete sim data? and (2) what did FBI tell Malaysia about the sim data? Malaysia probably hid it because it would have been explosive in its implications of an apparent hijacking of MH150, which to me has 1MDB implications. I would think the FBI told Malaysia that inference (and maybe told Saudi Arabia too).
We have to read intent into the data, which we have been extremely reluctant to do, for both the sim data and MH370 flight data. But I submit if we take that step, it is an apparent clandestine flight to the SIO, and it looks to me like a known flight path (part of a game plan that had been worked out before).
https://twitter.com/HDTBill/status/1356421217264279553?s=20
@TBill: Malaysia never wanted the sim data to be released. I also suspect that the data fields extracted by the Malaysian investigators might not exactly correspond to the data fields extracted by the FBI and shared with Australia. Perhaps different forensic methods were used.
It is not hard to understand why the Malaysians preferred to not disclose evidence that implicates the Captain. But why did the Malaysians choose to not share the information surrounding the First Officer’s cell phone registration with the Australians? And why were the targets in the Lido Hotel radar image not shared with the Australians?
Don’t be surprised if we never learn the answer to many of the questions surrounding the conduct of the investigation.
@Victor re Lido.
DSTG were given some military radar positions at 10s intervals, but only up to 18:02, then a single “LKP” at 1822. If that’s right, then the sensitivity is not about disclosing the positions derived from MY military radar. The only explanation I can think of is that a) the trace after 1802 came from 3rd country records they were not at liberty to share b) they made it up.
@Arto L:
I was taking an extra look at contrails and realized that I had been too sloppy on the two near 18 S. They do not come out of Learmonth but instead they go in or out (not sure) of Port Headland. Sorry for my mistake.
@370Location:
I find that the IR and WV pictures from METEOSAT7 were systematically recorded approximately 9 minutes before the corresponding visible pictures. I get the same result independent of method (looking at moving clouds or at progression of contrails). Is that in agreement with your knowledge of the recording method?
@paul smithson: I doubt the data is fabricated. It matches up well with the civilian radar data and the first handshake BTO and BFO data (allowing for the right offset maneuver after the last target at 18:22).
The Lido Hotel data combined with the civilian radar data shows a shallow turn around Penang and then an intercept of a radial from VAMPI followed by a trajectory along N571. The implication is one of automated flight with navigation by waypoints. This suggests cockpit inputs from an experienced aviator. It would be hard to come to this conclusion with only the target at 18:22, which might be why the Lido Hotel data was not shared.
A deficiency in all ‘witness’ and other tenuous connections conflated with the loss of MH370 is the absence of any exploration for what may actually have been a verifiable source for any sighting, or other phenomenon, that is alleged.
1) The McKay story: Songa Mercur was not the only offshore installation in the area around N8.36º E108.72º, Songa Mercur’s position. The semi-sub platform had been repositioned to that location in the weeks prior to 8th Mar 2014 from another site much further north in exploration Block-120 offshore Da Nang, to Block-5 in the Con Son Basin. In early 2014, pipeline laying was ongoing in the Con Son Basin and production was already established using FSO vessels. Songa Mercur was not sitting in glorious isolation, 100s of km offshore. I believe it’s much more likely that McKay sighted a helicopter, with illuminated landing light, enroute between Con Son island and another facility in the vicinity of Songa Mercur. A landling light is a focused, high intensity source, a minor a/c heading change or relative angle from the vantage point results in a significant difference to perceived brightness. That McKay sent his email to ‘phuquoctwr@gmail.com’ is something of a red flag for the credibility of the alleged message: Phu Quoc is/has been operated by Airports Corporation of Vietnam (vietnamairport.vn) and the air traffic control is provided by VATM (vatm.vn), an unverified Google mailbox appears entirely bogus.
2) Investigations. It may yet be a surprise to some but the fact of the matter is that Malaysia had NO ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION capacity in March 2014. The MH370 Safety Investigation Team was established only in April 2014, Kok Soo Chon’s appointment as chief investigator was made only during April 2014 and the Ministry of Transport was yet to institute the present Air Accident Investigation Bureau. Accident/incident investigations were typically undertaken under the auspices of the DCA.
@DonThompson
Don’t you think someone who regularly works on offshore rigs would recognize the distinct sound of a helicopter?
Instead, McKay described hearing a fixed-wing aircraft.
..he also described a fire ‘burning’ in the sky.
Unlike a focused beam of light coming from a landing light, what he saw appears to be shedding light omnidirectionally from a fixed point in the sky.
And if what he saw was something innocent and unrelated to MH370, then why was he under surveillance 5 years after the incident? Compare his situation to Kate Tee, who may also have witnessed something, but today blissfully blogs away unmolested.
who cares what he saw, if he saw anything? It was not MH370. That much is certain.
@Victor Iannello
Regarding, ‘Whether the fuel was removed before the position was shifted to the SIO is irrelevant.‘
It’s not irrelevant if you contend that ‘the captain’s simulator data [showed] a flight into the SIO ending in fuel exhaustion‘.
If you ran out of gas in Kansas and then your car was trucked to Texas you would not describe that as ‘a trip to Texas ending in fuel exhaustion. ‘
@Mick Gilbert: That analogy is absurd. The car can’t be trucked to Texas from Kansas in seconds with a drag and click of the mouse.
The end of the simulation was in the SIO and with fuel exhaustion. That the fuel was removed just before or just after the move to the SIO makes no difference. It shows the captain had prior thoughts about flying in a remote part of the SIO with no fuel, which occurred in real life several weeks after he created the simulation. To most of us, that severely implicates the captain.
@CMR,
I’m not debating whether McKay witnessed an aircraft on fire. As @ALSM has already emphatically replied, McKay did not witness 9M-MRO. It had turned, in the vicinity of IGARI, onto a track re-crossing the Malay peninsula towards Penang.
The contrivance of the McKay story is more fascinating.
In his email McKay, himself, questioned his observation “(the plane?)” and the distance “very difficult to judge the distance but […hey, I’ll take a punt regardless]“. As for discerning any sound over that estimated distance, while stood on a rig platform surrounded by machinery in operation, unlikely.
There are reasonable questions outstanding: why was McKay’s email composed with a subject line “(không có chù dê)” translating as “(no shrew)” or “(no goat temple)” depending on whether one prefers Google or Bing machine translation. Who was “Tri VaHuu“, the name attributed to the email address? Why did McKay’s colleague, Richard Beaton another industrry journeyman, provide cover as a representative of Idemitsu? Questions worthy of answers from some investigative journalist.
Concerning the attempt to contact McKay at his home, like so much in ‘The Disappearing Act’ this was recounted second hand, and the writer’s embellishment is oh-so transparent. The pre-amble embellishment set out that some good old gumshoe effort was required to locate McKay’s address, something that turned into a near year long effort, March thru late2019. Notably, my efforts turned up the relevant information in 20-30 minutes without setting foot in a NZ public library. So, eventually, in late 2019, Gumshoe Mike trudged over to McKay’s address only to be confronted with a hard “no comment, **** off“. Correctly describing McKay’s location as along a cul-de-sac, in fact near the closed end, was it then further embellishment, and cover for the wounded ego, to describe that a nondescript but perhaps perfectly innocous white car that turned at the end of the cul-de-sec. Was it really suspicious that it waited momentarily until Gumshoe Mike pulled off before also proceeding to the main road? Why follow only to the main road? StreetView imagery shows nondescript white cars parked along this cul-de-sac.
Another mention of Ms Tee. Yet another example of embellishment. Each blog post related to the matter involves something new, a fresh recollection. The many recollections do not, in any way, help locate 9M-MRO.
The resolution of the images from Pleiades of the stuck freighter in the Suez Canal is impressive.
@DonThompson
I never said Mike McKay saw MH370. I think he saw a parachute flare, either launched from an aircraft searching for something below, or launched from the ocean, signalling to the aircraft above.
Despite the hum of machinery, the sound of a helicopter is quite distinct, and it can be ruled out.
The email in question has 4 pages, and the world saw only the first page, meaning it was the latest reply/continuation of a previous email which may or may not have been discussing travel plans to ‘goat temples’. The default language of the Gmail client is Vietnamese, something may have been lost in translation.
I’m sure Gumshoe Mike knows the difference between standard driving behavior, and tailing.
@CanisMR: If somebody shows up unannounced at my house asking questions about MH370, I would also be suspicious. A strange car parked in my neighborhood would also arouse my suspicion.
As for what Mike McKay saw in the South China Sea, it may have been a flare. It would not surprise me if military was aware of the disappearance from monitoring ATC communications and had conducted a small search operation. Or, the flare was completely unrelated to MH370.
@Victor. Leaving aside the merits in your disagreement with @Mick Gilbert, you commented to him, “It shows the captain had prior thoughts about flying in a remote part of the SIO with no fuel”.
As I remember it we still have no idea as to what his purpose would be in doing that and why the aircraft would need to be there to do whatever it was.
Had he intended a pilotless descent on MEFE he would risk there being a vessel that might observe that, particularly were there dips and climbs during it. Besides he would risk an ELT transmission should the impact not be extreme.
He would be able to reduce those risks by adding “unnecessary” rudder trim, to roll the aircraft on autopilot disengagement. Still, why he choose not to monitor the leg south and control the descent. Also why, were there to be no to check for vessels in the locality, would he choose daylight for that?
In any case he would not have to reposition the aircraft in the SIO to explore such things.
@David: Others might have stronger opinions, but I can only guess as to why he created the simulation. However, I am a lot more certain that the simulated flight to the SIO ending in fuel exhaustion was indicative of premeditation.
@Victor
You asked At what time do you believe the cockpit was commandeered? ….Why do you believe the hijackers were invited into the cockpit?
Here is a more complete answer.
During HH’s interview in Apr 2014 with the BBC’s Jonah Fisher, the minister was asked about the cost and funding for the S&R operation. He replied “How much is Ukraine costing everybody? How much has it been for Syria?..and it’s still unfolding. How much has it cost the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq. Not only in dollars and cents but in lives? Here, which is peanuts, trying to find what happened to a plane with innocent people on board….. Closer to home, how much money is being paid to patrol these rocks in the South China Sea? Compare that to the cost of this SAR. Let’s put it in perspective.” The last part of this answer is quite strange, but if we put together some of the clues unearthed by FdC, then the link made between MH370 and patrolling the South China Sea makes sense.
EQUIPMENT – as described by FdC in her book from pg.360 onwards, a cargo of ‘Motorola’ electronic equipment was actually escorted from Penang to KLIA, and was not security-screened at the airport prior to loading on board MH370. If, for argument’s sake, we assume that the falsely labelled ‘Motorola’ cargo was actually some sort of electromagnetic surveillance equipment usually flown on board ISR aircraft patrolling the South China Sea, then it would require some sort of power source, independant of the plane’s power grid. It just so happens that there was also a load of Li-Ion batteries on board, which, if connected by a power cord to the ‘Motorola’ cargo, would perform this function.
DATA-SATCOM – the data collected by this surveillance equipment could be recorded and reviewed later, but would be more useful if it’s available for analysis in real-time, especially if the plane is being flown in coordination with other military ISR aircraft. The data needs to be uploaded via satellite in real-time to those who have the capability to analyze it. The Satcom terminal on MH370 could be repurposed for the duration of the surveillance task, and returned to it’s standard functions when the task is ended.
MANPOWER – prior to departure, after the cargo doors closed, someone on board the aircraft would have to connect the power cords between the surveillance equipment and the batteries, and connect the data cables to the satcom terminal of the plane. It just so happens that 2 east european passport holders who arrived at the boarding gates at the very last minutes, were described as more energetic than the rest of passengers, as if they had just physically exerted themselves. They also happened to be sitting directly beneath the satcom terminal, and so possibly completed their tasks in the process of storing their large, identical, carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment. After storing their luggage, they may have headed to the front of the cabin to speak to the captain who would have been aware of the mission, and allowed the men to sit in the cockpit, hence the foreign voices in the cockpit mentioned by FdC.
FdC writes “The most elaborate and far-fetched military narrative I could put together, gathering the many clues and leads collected, points towards a secret service mission that indeed did go SNAFU. …. The ‘precious cargo’ would more likely be sent to China by the US, to be used for their own-that is, American- benefit. China could have got wind of this operation and so was eagerly waiting for the special cargo to be delivered in Beijing, where it would just grab it. “
Nothing went SNAFU. Instead, in the middle of the flight, the special operatives announced that the mission was compromised, and took control of the aircraft away from the pilots, and directed it back to Malaysia, towards Penang. The pilots who were locked out of the cockpit, seeing that the plane had swung around Penang airport without landing, panicked and started calling on their cellphones.
@CMR
You are clearly smitten by ‘The Disappearing Act’.
Readers would’ve been well served had its author understood how cargo consignments move across land (MH6807) and air (MH370) and the processes involved therein. But no, readers are served up a mish-mash of intrigue and misinformed inanity.
@CanisMR: I asked and you responded. That’s quite a story.
CMR: This statement:
“EQUIPMENT – as described by FdC in her book from pg.360 onwards, a cargo of ‘Motorola’ electronic equipment was actually escorted from Penang to KLIA, and was not security-screened at the airport prior to loading on board MH370. If, for argument’s sake, we assume that the falsely labelled ‘Motorola’ cargo was actually some sort of electromagnetic surveillance equipment usually flown on board ISR aircraft patrolling the South China Sea, then it would require some sort of power source, independant _[sic]_ of the plane’s power grid. It just so happens that there was also a load of Li-Ion batteries on board, which, if connected by a power cord to the ‘Motorola’ cargo, would perform this function.”
One of many FdC statements that show how totally ignorant she is of how the world actually works. Complete nonsense.
@ALSM
To be fair, this ‘statement’ is mine. FdC simply wrote about the transfer of the socalled ‘secret’ cargo.
@DonThompson
Yes, the transfer of cargo requiring special handling does fit SOP, but doesn’t eliminate the suspicions raised by contents of the package.
CMR:
A) There was no secret cargo, so why amplify the BS?
B) If the “…special handling does fit SOP…”, why claim it “…doesn’t eliminate the suspicions raised by contents of the package”. That’s ridiculous.
Bottom line: The cargo had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of MH370, and FdC’s attempt to revisit that rabbit hole only illustrates her ignorance and propensity to exploit conspiracy theories to sell books.
A long article came out today on MH370 by “Admiral Cloudberg”. There’s not a lot of new information, but the author does a good job at presenting the facts and current thinking. He also proposes what he thinks is the only scenario that is credible. Spoiler alert: The captain diverted the plane.
Admiral Cloudberg
http://theavion.com/aviations-unlikely-specialist-interviewing-reddits-unofficial-air-crash-analyst/
“Kylan Dempsey is a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Originally from California, he is currently studying Russian Language and Culture. Dempsey, who goes by u/admiral_cloudberg on Reddit, is the Writer-in-Chief and moderator of his own subreddit, r/admiralcloudberg, where he posts a detailed analysis of a historical air crash every Saturday. Surprisingly enough, Dempsey does not have any background in aviation safety, but this does not hamper his ability to write captivating articles on different aviation accidents, where he highlights everything from pilot error to counterfeit parts. The Avion Newspaper interviewed Kylan via Zoom to ask questions and to inquire about his upcoming books.”
@Victor Iannello
‘… the author does a good job at presenting the facts …‘
Seriously? Barely five paragraphs in we’re presented with this long debunked BS canard,
‘At the gate in Kuala Lumpur, Zaharie oversaw the refueling of the plane, electing to take on perhaps a little bit more fuel than he needed — enough to reach two alternate airports, with a bit more still on top of that, despite good weather in Beijing. Perhaps he was just being cautious; we may never know.‘
As Andrew has noted, the MAS operations manual lists ZBTJ (Tianjin), ZSSS (Shanghai) and ZSPD (Shanghai-Pudong) as alternates for ZBAA. ZSSS and ZSPD are significantly further away from ZBAA than ZSJN, so the choice of ZSJN as the alternate actually resulted in MH370 carrying less fuel than it might have done under MAS ops rules.
@ALSM
SIGINT collection requires multiple, coordinated receivers because ‘ locating the transmitter’s position is usually part of SIGINT. Triangulation and more sophisticated radio location techniques, such as time of arrival methods, require multiple receiving points at different locations. These receivers send location-relevant information to a central point, or perhaps to a distributed system in which all participate, such that the information can be correlated and a location computed.’
The Mar 8 2014 flight of MH370 happens to coincide with Cope Tiger 2014, the joint-US military exercises that would have attracted the attention of the PLA. Clandestine SIGINT collection for spying on and locating PLA assets may have included the deploying passive sensors on board MH370 and other civilian airliners of allied countries that traverse the S.China sea. These airliners would have turned off their transponders to let a military aircraft such as a RC-135 spoof their hexcode while flying in parallel, and allow their SATCOM links to transmit the SIGINT data in real time in an effort to triangulate and locate PLA assets. The biggest client of the SATCOM provider is the US Military.
https://www.inmarsat.com/en/insights/government/2018/delivering-critical-support-for-airborne-intelligence-surveillance-and-reconnaissance-missions.html
Perhaps this is what FdC really meant when she wrote on pg.353 “..as soon as MH370 passed IGARI, two AWACS planes sandwiched MH370 and completely blocked its magnetic field and all its communications, effectively cloaking it and rendering it invisible… the AWACS planes were shadowing MH370, most likely from above and below…”
@Mick Gilbert: I didn’t read where he said the choice of alternate airports was selected to take on more fuel. Sure, he could have selected other alternates that resulted in even more fuel.
There were places where he didn’t get the facts exactly right, but considering his intended audience (not the readers here), I think on the whole, he did he good job, and much better than most of what I’ve read from other published pieces in recent months.
@CMR,
“would have […] may have […] would have [..] perhaps […] really meant”
Let’s go with 2 verifiable facts:
1) Cope Tiger 2014 did not coincide with the MH370 service on 8th March 2014. Cope Tiger did not begin until 10th March 2014.
2) Cope Tiger 2014 was hosted at RTAF ‘Korat’ Nakhon Ratchasima province (Thailand). That location is at least 650km, and two national boundaries away, from any point on 9M-MRO’s flight plan for the MH370 service.
As for the intelligence available to the PLA or any others, an example is an openly available video record of a mass aircraft launch at RTAF Korat. As the author of ‘The ‘Disappearing Act’ had acquired radar logs acquired by a Thai radar installation that recorded military aircraft within its range, a temporarily deployed small network of SDRs within the area of the Korat airbase provides a means to capture the transponder logs from the aircraft. Simple means, all negating the need for any cloaked, invisible secret intelligence gathering aircraft.
This conjecture upon conjecture for what the author of ‘The Disappearing Act’ has contrived or speculated to have occurred is a consequence of one thing: the ideas for the loss of 9M-MRO that are set out in the book are a fiction.
Thank you for the entertainment.
@Don Thompson
Cope North 2014 took place at Anderson AFB in Guam, Feb 17-28. Unless the military assets deployed for the 2 different exercises were from completely different units, it’s reasonable to assume they are mostly the same assets. They may have pre-
…pre-positioned in Singapore between the two excercises.
I’m suggesting that it was the US military aircraft that were coordinating with MH370 and spying on the PLA in the S.China sea
@VictorI – please delete the previous 2 comments[@ 1:19p & 1:24p 03/28/2021]. Thank you.
@Don Thompson
Cope North 2014 took place at Anderson AFB in Guam, Feb 17-28. Unless the military assets deployed for the 2 different exercises were from completely different units, it’s reasonable to assume they are mostly the same assets. They may have pre-positioned in Singapore between the two exercises.
I’m suggesting that it was the US military aircraft that were coordinating with MH370 and spying on the PLA in the S.China sea.
It’s worth noting that IGARI lies not only at the border of Malaysia & Vietnam, but it’s also the meeting point of the FIR boundaries of Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and Thailand. Aircraft transiting between Singapore and Thailand don’t identify themselves to either Malaysia or Vietnam.
FdC wrote on pg.293 “but what these data certainly indicated was that during the days and nights before and after MH370 went astray, there was a massive military presence in the sky and in the region.”
@CMR
Cope North 2014 and Cope Tiger 2014.
Is it “reasonable to assume they are mostly the same assets“?
No, it’s not.
Cope North 2014 involved USAF F-15s out of Kadena AFB, Japan and F-16s out of Eielson AFB, Alaska
Cope Tiger 2014 involved F-15s deployed by the 159th Fighter Wing, Louisiana Air National Guard, home stationed at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans, Louisiana.
So, not the same assets.
The surveillance role over the South China Sea (the domain is the clue) is the responsibility of the US Navy. In 2014, P3-C Orions and P-8A Poseidons were evident at forward operating bases such as the military ramp at Clarke International Airport, Philippines, and RMAF Labuan, bordering the SCS.
Good job Don.
BTW…they should take your container ship advice and start unloading. Maybe offload the fuel first. Seriously. Nothing else seems to be working.
@VictorI
OK thank you for the link.
At least now I will understand references to Admiral Cloudberg.
The article is reminiscent of William Langewiesche’s summary article in the Atlantic but more detailed and a bit less professional sounding.
@Don Thompson. Next.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p17g08bamwlor1c/From%20Avast.docx?dl=0
@airlandseaman;
“Nothing else seems to be working.”
The reality of the situation the vessel is in, can best be described by simply looking at the numbers involved that resulted in its grounding.
Ever Given had entered the southern end of the canal at 8 knots speed over ground (SoG) and subsequently the speed increased to about 13 knots – apparently in trying to get steering control when being buffeted by a strong southerly wind. This initial short leg is on a heading of 045T, followed by a gentle turn to port before establishing on the main heading of 348T. On completing the turn the vessel was slowly swinging from bank to bank, i.e. ‘fish-tailing’.
My guess is that during or just before the final skimming almost alongside the west bank of the canal at about 05:40:28 UTC, the main engine was put Full Astern, as the resulting swing to starboard was greater than previously seen. The SoG at 05:42:15 UTC had reduced slightly to 12.3 knots when the bulbous bow ploughed into the stepped sand slope of the east canal bank. At 05:42:15 UTC the SoG was recorded at 2.1 knots, and all the forward longitudinal motion would have been arrested in the next 10 to 15 seconds. At 05:42:58 UTC the AIS recorded the vessels SoG as 0.9 knots; an artifact of the vessel’s stern still swinging to port.
Any momentum arrested by the engine operating in the astern mode, would have been negligible due to propeller cavitation in the confined channel.
So the momentum of 200,000 gross tonnes was absorbed in approximately 60 seconds, primarily in the bank of the canal, but obviously in unrecorded damage to the vessel’s bulbous bow and nearby double bottom and wing tanks.
They may be able to swing the stern of the vessel into the center of the canal, but I believe the bow section will be pinned on rocks etc..
@BarryC
Thank you for your concise summary. The AIS animation was very informative, as was an article at the FT that described how in narrow channels the ship’s bow can naturally be pushed away from the bank while the stern is drawn to it.
I wonder if Egptian President al-Sisi will now issue an edict for a second channel for the passage south of the Bitter Lakes.
It should be clear in an hour if the bow will be refloated without further intervention, the stern now pulled into mid-channel.
@David,
🙂
In the absence of continuous new information to fill the firehose of news the memes have replaced headlines.
The FT article I mentioned above. Can’t guarantee it’ll bypass the FT paywall as the link is intended to redirect from Twitter.
The midday (Cairo time) pull wasn’t successful. Perhas more dredging.
It’s fascinating how much EO satellite imagery is being used, visible spectrum and SAR, no doubt furthering the misconception of perpetual space based surveillance. More space craft and sensors are resulting in more frequent over passes but continuous capture at a specific location would require Starlink/OneWeb sized constellations? Totally changes news gathering but I’ve yet to see ‘drone’ acquired video from the site.
I had a quick read of the “Admiral Cloudberg” piece. It is better than most other commentaries.
One statement piqued my interest . . . “While trying to use the transponder to squawk a distress code, he accidentally turns it off”.
I don’t know what the SOP is on a B777, and it may differ from airline to airline, but I was taught that the correct procedure when changing transponder codes was to first switch the transponder to STBY, set the code, and then switch back to Mode C or whatever.
We know the transponder ceased to function. But why? Is it possible that someone was trying to change the code to squawk a distress code and was:
1. overcome in some way and prevented from doing so
2. forgot to switch back
3. or, more likely, deliberately switched it off.
@BrianA
The other related question would be – Is it true the ACARS would send an alert message if transponder was turned off? I have never heard that mentioned before.
@Brian Anderson
The procedure you mentioned was taught in the days when light aircraft had transponders with a rotary knob for selecting each digit of the assigned squawk code. More ‘modern’ transponders have buttons for selecting the code and the transponder doesn’t change the code until all four digits have been entered. It is not an SOP to switch the transponder to STBY before changing codes on the B777 or any other airline aircraft I have flown in the last 27 years.
TBill: Re: “Is it true the ACARS would send an alert message if transponder was turned off?” Answer: NO.
@George G.
Flight SJ182 CVR recovered:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-31/voice-recorder-found-on-final-day-of-sriwijaya-air-crash-search
David,
Yay !
Just about to send this so I will too.
https://worldofaviation.com/2021/03/cockpit-voice-recorder-finally-found-for-sriwijaya-737-crash/?utm_source=WorldofAviation&utm_campaign=31_03_2021&utm_medium=email&utm_content=1&utm_emailID=4ee65c520d7b2f39a08e5a28ed51aea7fa26be484e22ec3743a76380a0a330cb
@David, @George G: That’s great news. We should know more in a week or so.
@canisMR
“Perhaps this is what FdC really meant when she wrote on pg.353 “..as soon as MH370 passed IGARI, two AWACS planes sandwiched MH370 and completely blocked its magnetic field and all its communications, effectively cloaking it and rendering it invisible… the AWACS planes were shadowing MH370, most likely from above and below…””
Can I ask – do you believe that?
@Vodkaferret,
It quite plausibly may have been plan. Consider the diversion to HK of MH066, an A330 flying at night from KL to Incheon,SK on Mar 24, 2014.
Officially, it was blamed on a failure of the main power generator. But this plane was less than 2yrs old.
This is exactly the kind of plane that would have been used for surveillance of the S.China sea. The PLA may have gotten suspicious of this aircraft, and forced it to divert in order to inspect it. This incident happened a few days after the fire in the avionics department of MAS.
This is only getting more entertaining…
“This is exactly the kind of plane that would have been used for surveillance of the S.China sea.
Seriously? An Airbus A330-300. Perhaps MAS provided night vision equipment to the passengers to help with that surveillance?
These comments read as if ‘Alan Tan’ has developed another pseudonym.
@vodkaferret asked “do you believe that“. Do provide an answer.
@Don Thompson
By kind of plane I meant a big fat radar profile that other aircraft can hide behind.
night vision equipment for passengers?… Please. Humans are involved only in the final, analysis phase of SIGINT collection.
Consider the strange reticence of the French in the MH370 affair. What could explain it unless the French are also involved in SIGINT collection with Airbus aircraft, the same way the 5eyes community is doing it with Boeing aircraft?
I’ve never heard of Alan Tan, although I will Google him to find out what he has said about MH370.
do you believe that… I used to drink the coolaid served by JW for the longest time. Now that I don’t believe the Russians did it, everything is up for grabs.
So do I believe it? Right now everything feels like new evidence, so the theory I wrote feels like the most plausible explanation.
@CMR
Not ‘Alan Tan’, OK.
Perhaps ‘Big Red Dog’ should set up a zoomerang with the old ‘Blue Pig’, give these loose ideas some thought-opsy or just socialise them over a long walk along a short plank.
Anyways, alt & ◀️ a few clicks, back up to the missed turn, and dial in fb.com/VeritasMH370. Good luck!
@CMR
Not ‘Alan Tan’, OK.
Perhaps ‘Big Red Dog’ should set up a zoomerang with the old ‘Blue Pig’, give these loose ideas some thought-opsy or just socialise them over a long walk along a short plank.
Anyways, alt & ◀️ a few clicks, back up to the missed turn, and dial in fb.com/VeritasMH370. Good luck!
@CanisMR said: …the same way the 5eyes community is doing [SIGINT collection] with Boeing aircraft?
Are you implying that Five Eyes countries are using commercial flights for SIGINT? Do you have more details? (I’m not talking about military flights using civilian ICAO codes.)
@CanisMagnusRufus
“Alan Tan” is a fake name from FdC’s recent book that she used to protect the actual identity of a formerly active MH370 discussion participant.
This is an example where her book is actually interesting to learn more about the background/motives (eg; anti-American sentiments) of someone who been active in the MH370 discussion.
@TBill: I found the encounter with “Alan Tan” quite entertaining.
@VictorI
Are you implying that Five Eyes countries are using commercial flights for SIGINT?
Yes, but only as a tit-for-tat measure, and under restricted circumstances.
I believe, this is why MH17 was shot down by the Russians, and UIA 752 was shot down by the Iranians. Both these countries suspected that
…cont’d…. suspected that commercial aircraft were being used for SIGINT, but didn’t have the right opportunity. When MH370 happened, they may have realized that it was related to SIGINT by the US, and they too now had the opportunity for sending a message to the US military/world.
@TBill ..I love America and Americans. But the America I loved was a Christian country. Now it has been taken over by the Deep State.
@CanisMR: That’s quite a claim to make with no evidence.
@CMR,
Clarify: do you believe that certain civil aircraft are equipped to carry out SIGINT ops OR that civil aircraft are routinely exploited to physically ‘cloak’ military SIGINT aircraft that operate in close proximity.
@DonThompson,
Despite the constant pressure from the US, and unlike Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan or Japan, Malaysia had always been reluctant to confront the PLAAN in the S.China Sea. Hence, they may have allowed some commercial aircraft to be outfitted with SIGINT equipment to do clandestine surveys to compensate for this.
So in the case of Malaysia and S.China sea, both.
@VictorI
The HPCR Manual on International Law Applicable to Air and Missile Warfare, section J(I) 63. states the following:
Subject to Rule 68, activities such as any of the following may render a civilian airliner a military objective:
(d) Being incorporated into or assisting the enemy’s intelligence gathering system, e.g., engaging in reconnaissance, early warning, surveillance or command, control and communications missions
https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/8B2E79FC145BFB3D492576E00021ED34-HPCR-may2009.pdf
In Feb 2021, an independent analysis was performed as to whether Ukraine was negligent in failing to close the airspace over Eastern Ukraine during during the summer of 2014. The following lines are interesting:
Ukraine’s ministry of defence believed military aircraft were vulnerable to MANPADS attack and, on 6 June 2014, imposed restricted airspace up to 26,000ft to allow military aircraft to operate out of MANPADS range – flying at altitudes of 22,000-24,000ft – with an extra buffer above them.
But uncertainty surrounds the reasons by [sic] this restricted airspace ceiling was increased to 32,000ft, at the request of the civil air navigation service UkSATSE, on 14 July 2014 – the same day a Ukrainian air force Antonov An-26 was shot down, and three days before the attack on the 777.
Ukrainian aviation authorities insisted to the Dutch Safety Board that the decision to raise the ceiling arose from the need to put an additional buffer between military and civil aircraft operations, and not from an indication of risk to civil traffic above 26,000ft. The inquiry was also told that the ceiling increase was initiated before the An-26 incident, and was “not connected in any way”. Dutch investigators could not establish a direct link and concluded the underlying reason remained “unclear”.
https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/no-evidence-ukraine-aware-of-threat-before-mh17-shot-down-analysis/142327.article
NATO AWACS aircraft were nearby, and may have captured the fire-control radar for the BUK which brought down MH17.
At the time of the incident it was reported that a US RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft and a AWACS E3 surveillance aircraft observing the conflict may have captured electronic intelligence and communications surrounding the event. This intelligence data would include Buk target acquisition radar and missile guidance signals
https://theconversation.com/mh17-crash-report-establishes-the-cause-but-only-criminal-investigation-can-find-those-responsible-49178
@CanisMR: Where in that extract is there an indication that civilian airliners were used for SIGINT acquisition?
@CMR
The MH17 link tells me there is a Flight Safety Foundation with HQ a few miles from here. So I checked to see FlightSafety.org info on MH370, and not much. They seem to be in passive mode on MH370.
@ CanisMagnusRufus
Thats interesting. Exactly when did America cease to be a Christian country and become ruled by the Deep State ? Was it before or after the disappearance of Malaysia 370 ?
@Miden Agan…. after 9/11
@CanisMagnusRufus
So what implications does that have for MH 370 ?
@Miden Agan …. one implication of a Deep State takeover is the overriding imperative of secrecy, and it’s corollary, obfuscation.
Right from the beginning we see these two at play in the MH370 saga.
The ‘disappearance’ itself was designed to obscure what happened on board the plane, and it’s final fate. And today we see both Malaysia and Australia use the ‘state secrets’ excuse to shut down further investigation into what really happened to MH370.
We also see the MSM actively working with governments to obfuscate by using experts to drown out any substantive discussions about the disappearance of this plane. You look closely at these ‘experts’ and their affiliations and you realize that they were at one time working for aviation law firms or governments, in N.America or Europe.
Take Christine N for example. Did you know that she used to work for the big aviation firm K & K in NY? She came out with the cockpit decompression theory, effectively blaming the manufacturer for the plane’s troubles which is good news for the lawyers. Then you have Larry V, an ex-govt employee, putting out his theory of the suicidal pilot’s ‘controlled ditching.’ Between the two of them, they took up a significant amount of media coverage of MH370. This doesn’t mean they don’t have something substantive to add to the discussion. I think Larry V’s book is excellent, on par with Richard Q’s or FdC’s book, and required reading for anybody interested in MH370.
But this event took place in South East Asia! Did any experts on South East Asian aviation, politics, or militaries, get invited on TV to point out the obvious facts and explain to Western audiences what they think may have happened? No!
Western audiences were suckered into believing that either the usual ‘suspects’ were somehow involved or the pilot was experiencing a mid-life crisis and carried out a suicidal flight into the SIO.
When the Deep State and it’s enablers thought they had successfully distracted the masses with the ‘mystery’ of MH370, along comes Russia and shoots down MH17, throwing a wrinkle in everybody’s plans.
@CanisMagnusRufus
So why do you think the Deep State used 370 as a distraction ? How did MH 17 throw a wrinkle into “everybody’s” plans ? What more do you think the American Deep State has done recently ?
And yet again the Shallow State slips by, avoiding any and all scrutiny.
Anyone else missing Dennis?
BREAKING: area man, CanusMagnusRufus, yet to comprehend that the “media” is a profit driven enterprise, long gone is broad endeavour that was news, journalism, and factual writing as a public service. Mysterious events, controversy, salacious contrivances attract clicks on pages and eyes on screens.
BTW: just to keep the conversation factual, the comment above contains yet another “Big Red Dog”/CliffG figment of inanity, “This incident happened a few days after the fire in the avionics department of MAS“: no, the fire occurred before the MH066 incident. But why let facts get in the way of an assinine thread of supposition?
@CMR
USA had a number of interests on MH370:
(1) Protect Boeing (American company) from unfair blame, but if Boeing had done something wrong, then that would have been admitted to; and
(2) Figure out cause of the accident (with particular interest in international terrorism), and I infer-
(3) give Malaysia sovereign right to handle the spin of MH370 communications as long as: (a) no unfair blame is put on anyone, and also (b) I deduce Malaysia had to tell the truth about apparent intentional diversion and that the home simulator runs were thought by FBI to be incriminating or at least very suspicious.
Hish temporarily covered-up the last item (sim data) by at first saying there was “nothing sinister” in the simulator work. That “mistake” by Malaysia was fixed in June_2014 when Malaysia told The Times that actually there was a wayward flight in the sim data.
I can sympathize with you that MH370 is a mess, where the public was, in so many words, encouraged by Malaysia handling to develop alternate theories. Pilot suicide as cause is not in anyone’s best interest, so in my opinion we have treated the pilot and Malaysia with “kid gloves” to the extent there is lot’s of confusion. Only the public is confused…governments, industry know the pilot probably did it.
@TBill said: Only the public is confused…governments, industry know the pilot probably did it.
From the outset, the Malaysian officials spewed a mixture of information, disinformation, and misinformation. Some of the falsehoods were eventually corrected. Many were not.
The Malaysian SIR was an opportunity to set the record straight. To their credit, they did not propose a scenario involving mechanical failure, but instead said the facts were more aligned with deliberate diversion. But since the RMP had already absolved the captain, they had to introduce a mysterious third party as the possible perpetrator. I think other governments have recognized this as a way of saving face, and have not pressed Malaysia on this in the interest of international diplomacy and pragmatism.
@Victor. Another overlay is that an aircraft inquiry is not about attributing blame. If the inquiry had resolved that the Captain did it, on the balance of the probabilities, that would be a public condemnation, with possible legal consequences in various directions, and also moral in its effect on his family.
Offsetting that, if on the other hand any inquiry had come to such a finding, even though just based on circumstantial evidence, then aircraft safety might be more likely to benefit.
Awkward. In this instance though there is little to be gained by a condemnatory finding. I repeat myself I know when I say that prevention of pilot suicide prevention has been examined in depth quite recently after that of Lubitz of GermanWings.
Perversely though that was made possible by changes to cabin access after 9/11.
As to whether the Malaysian Government ‘guided’ the MH370 inquiry findings, there was no formal objection to those by its accredited reps, though there had been a precedent in the NTSB’s objections to the Indonesian inquiry’s outcome in the SilkAir Flight 185 case, and there had been a fuss to do with the ATSB’s view as a non-accredited rep.
Likewise there was no objection to Malaysia’s, “….disinformation and misinformation”, or “falsehoods”. Possibly that is because such and lack of damage assessments etc were not seen as deliberate.
There are quite a few pursuing blame in MH370’s case but unless a suicide finding is unequivocal there must be care and judgement applied to what is effectively an accusation and will be treated publicly as more.
Blame of itself does not improve flying safety and does not necessarily mean culpability anyway. It depends on whether the perpetrator is exercising free will or could do no other. I notice Wikipedia has it that the Lubitz family does not accept that Andreas Lubitz “deliberately caused” that crash.
@VictorI…… But since the RMP had already absolved the captain, they had to introduce a mysterious third party as the possible perpetrator. I think other governments have recognized this as a way of saving face, and have not pressed Malaysia on this in the interest of international diplomacy and pragmatism.
When MH17 was shot down, why did then PM Najib, and after him the next PM MM, refuse to blame the Russians for the shootdown? In fact, after the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to the Russians, PM MM said there was ‘no evidence’ to blame the Russians! Where is the ‘interest of international diplomacy and pragmatism?’ Why didn’t Malaysia ‘save face’ by accepting the evidence, and move on?
@David: To not apportion blame is fine and to be expected, as the purpose of the report is to be factual and to improve safety. But to exonerate the most likely suspect and to introduce a very unlikely scenario is not helpful.
@CanisMR: I don’t know the reason that Malaysia chose to give Russia a pass on MH17. I can think of lots of possibilities, with none of the possibilities related to using commercial airlines to spy.
@Victor. As I read it the applicable SIR conclusions are:
p.440, “There is no evidence to suggest that the PIC and FO experienced recent changes or difficulties in personal relationships or that there were any conflicts or problems between them.”
Even so, at p. 442, “The recommendations made address….reporting and following-up of crew mental health, ….”
p.442/443, “the investigation was unable to identify any plausible aircraft or systems failure mode that would lead to the observed systems deactivation, diversion from the filed flight plan route and the subsequent flight path taken by the aircraft. However, the same lack of evidence precluded the investigation from definitely eliminating that possibility. The possibility of intervention by a third party cannot be excluded either.”
I do not see that these “exonerate the most likely suspect”.
Also, at p.447, its safety recommendation #10 is, “To ensure that the flight crew report to MAB Flight Operations of any serious ailment that can cause medical incapacitation and therapy prescribed at MAB medical facilities as well as MAB-appointed panel clinics.”
Again at p.447, its safety recommendation #12 is, “To review the process of reporting system and the action flow when flight crew and cabin crew’s health may become a risk factor for the safety of the aircraft operations.”
@David,
The media and hence the public see the executive summary, therefore the subtle clues provided in the the report’s substance are lost; essentially by design.
@David,
Why omit to highlight safety recommendation #07? To DCA:
“To review the privileging process of the appointment of the designated aviation medical examiners on a regular basis.”
and #11, to MAB:
“To ensure that the medical records of the flight crew maintained by the MAB Medical Centre to include records maintained by different panel clinics. The complete medical record of the individual flight crew shall show all visits to any panel clinics, the details of ailments and therapy prescribed.”
Add the detail of medical records presented in the RMP ‘Pilot’ report. Following the pilot’s significant injury and surgical procedure in 2007 only one follow up medical consultation was recorded, in May 2008 despite the symptoms detailed in the consultation indicating degenerative conditions.
At the press conference concerning the publication of the 2018 SIR, one savvy member of the press asked, “The report recommended more reporting and following up of crew mental health and Malaysia Airlines include medical records maintained at other clinics. Why [this recommendation] if you are not of the opinion that the pilots or crew are [responsible for the loss].”
Chief Investigator Kook Soo Chon replied “that the investigation had found that MAS procedures were deficient in monitoring the medical records of flight and cabin crew.“. Oh, OK then.
Note also that the RMP report and the SIR provide contradicting explanations for the January 2007 accident.
As Barry notes, “the subtle clues provided in the the report’s substance are lost; essentially by design.“.
These notes suggest something that is more complex than the accusations levelled at the pilot.
@David said: I do not see that these “exonerate the most likely suspect”.
That’s fair. The words have more nuance than my characterization.
@Victor. Thank you.
@David
Verbally re: SIR I believe the Malaysia official said the report exonerated the pilot, which is what many Malaysian’s wanted to hear (even though it probably is not a true statement).
To me the fine point is, we need to be able to say, for aircraft safety corrections, that the pilot probably did it. At the same I recognize that is not proven in a court of law. So I am not saying the pilot is legally to blame nor do I actually blame ZS. I would say, in the course of a human life, a person can go astray due to various situations. Were there proper safeguards to help keep out rogue pilot on track? No, it was a total failure with blame that goes to Malaysia, the airline, and possibly design of the aircraft.
So when I say the pilot probably did it, I am most assuredly not blaming the pilot in an unkind manner that you may not like (assessing blame).
Here’s what FdC says about the captain’s relationship with Fatima (Tim) Pardi:
Just as I was starting to find the picture almost too perfect, I came across some not so flattering testimonies. A former technician with a phone company who was now in the car rental sector, to whom Zaharie ‘doesn’t talk much’, mentioned a woman friend of his called Fatimah N. (not her real name), a kindergarten teacher, who was also involved in opposition politics as a volunteer. He told the police that Zaharie had had an affair with her recently. Fatimah had confided to him about the relationship with Zaharie. She even wanted a divorce from her husband. A few days before the tragic night, she told the technician in tears over the phone that she had quarrelled with Zaharie, even saying that she had prayed that his plane would crash.
The police had already interviewed Fatimah. According to the dates and times given in the report, she was interviewed a second time after her friend’s testimony but there were no indications whatsoever of her special relationship with the captain in her own statement. She only mentioned that Zaharie was ‘kind hearted, responsible and knowledgeable’ and said she knew nothing about his family.
This account aligns with the interview with Ms. Pardi that was published in The Australian:
As the friendship developed, Captain Zaharie would regularly call in to see Ms Pardi and her children, then aged 3, 6 and 10, on his return from long flights. In between visits, the two would talk on the phone, she said. “Last time I contacted him was two days before the tragedy. I did not know he was on the flight until everyone from the party started contacting me asking ‘Is the captain on the plane?’ I said no, but when I got home from work I watched the news and saw his name.”
The two saw each other less frequently from January 2014 because of a “personal matter” she would not elaborate on. Captain Zaharie continued to see her children after she urged him not to “let the children become victims of this separation”.
Yet, the SIR makes no mention of the captain’s close relationship and separation with Fatima Pardi, despite several investigative interviews with Ms. Pardi. Rather, it says:
Information obtained from family and friends of both the PIC and FO suggested no recent changes or difficulties in personal relationships. There was nothing significant observed by the family and friends of the crew. The PIC and FO as well as the crew were not experiencing difficulties in any personal relationships.
@ Mick Gilbert
“Anyone else missing Dennis?“
I certainly do. I’m sure there would have been a comment including “arm waving” in relation to some of the recent posts.
Saddened at the news of his passing. Long time reader of this blog and always appreciated his input, whether I thought his opinions were right or wrong.
@TBill.”So when I say the pilot probably did it, I am most assuredly not blaming the pilot in an unkind manner…..”
Same here Bill. I would hope that inquirers in Malaysia and elsewhere will have looked into that leading possibility openly in informal discussions. When though it comes to formal statements such as the SIR they will just include evidence and deductions that they can substantiate, as distinct from having grounds to suspect.
I imagine that they could not utilise information given in confidence as substantiation for anything, unless they can find a work-around.
Expanding beyond your point, as to whether the investigation has been hobbled or swayed, for my part reasonable grounds for that deduction are not evident.
To the contrary there is the lack of dissent from the accredited reps, supplemented by the informal advice from the Malaysian PM to his Australian counterpart. From that I infer that no cover-up of the likelihood of the Captain’s involvement was instigated by the Malaysian Government at least.
@Mick
In memory of Dennis-
In case anyone is interested, I made some personal notes …my take on what DennisW believed about MH370.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j7VV26vkouyEv6UtgP_iOqUfZJFkLKH-AD35zEXIVO0/edit?usp=sharing
@All:
In thinking about the MH370 mystery, even though we can only speculate about the “why”, I think there is consensus about the “who” and “how”. We are also attempting to narrow down the “where” along the 7th arc.
So other than the “why” and the “where”, is the mystery solved? What are the other lingering questions we have?
Only the big one = the lumbering herd of elephants = why don’t the various “authorities” give a damn.
@ventus45: Probably because we have reasonable guesses for the “who” and the “how”.
What really matters is the why, and no one in authority has made any attempt at that – indded they have steadfastly avoided it – which “smells”.
The case for the simulator premeditated pilot mass murder suicide would be a lot stronger if the captain had actually practiced the flight from KL to Igari, then practiced executing the 270 degree turn, then practiced the flight back over the Malay peninsula skirting the Thai Malay border, then practiced the second turn northwest at Penang . But he didn’t. So this simulator theory hangs it hat on a few manual moves in the Southern Indian Ocean with a mouse and saved files. Incriminating if he did it, but not ironclad, and a weaker case. One would think that a diabolical homicidal suicidal captain would actually fly a practice run on his simulator of the monumental last flight of his life, especially the early part in the Gulf of Thailand where he disappears and makes his great escape. But he didnt.
@Miden. Why would he or you or me practice anything in our own back yard ? He knew exactly what to do where and when in Malaysian airspace. In any case, if the original planning had have been off the back of a European, Indian, or Sand Pit flight, such considerations are moot.
@Miden Agar. “But he didn’t.” Maybe he did but there was nought of it saved; or if some scraps were, they were missed?
But why would he need to practise the comparatively straightforward?
To me, incriminating would be evidence of him exploring the effect of manually applied residual rudder trim in an engine-less descent. That is not something he would be familiar with.
He could do that anywhere. I wonder if the RMP would have been alert to finding something like that?
@Ventus 45. As to the authorities and their interest, I have asked the deputy PM’s office if they would expedite a response to my question about the Australian government’s attitude to a new search.
@Victor. “What are the other lingering questions we have?” To me, nothing substantial.
As to the “where” even the answer to that is unlikely to lead to a gain in flight safety or indeed answer the “why”.
So the main purposes in continuing with advancing the finding of the wreckage are because some (most maybe?) of the next-of-kin are keen for another search and, maybe, if successful, for some wreckage to be recovered and analysed.
There is of course also the ‘because it’s there’ challenge.
@Ventus. We crossed I see.
@Miden Agan: I in a blog comment on April 30, 2017, I noted that the simulator data resembles MH150:
The flight might have been a simulation of a flight from KLIA to Jeddah with a diversion, as the fuel loading and SID are consistent with that. Also, Zaharie Shah was scheduled to captain MH150 to Jeddah on Feb 4, 2014. The Shadow Copy Set containing the deleted flight file fragments was dated Feb 3, 2014.
In a later blog post on the simulator, which I wrote after the Australian report was released, I said:
Now that we know that the exact date of the simulation session was February 2, 2014, the link between the simulation session and MH150 is less speculative. The authors of the recent ATSB report had similar thoughts:
“On the day the simulation was conducted the PIC was on a rostered day of leave. The following day the PIC was rostered to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Denpasar, Bali and return the same day. On 4 February 2014 the PIC was rostered to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The first three data points recovered from the simulator were consistent with the route from Kuala Lumpur to Jeddah. In the weeks between the Jeddah flight and the accident flight the PIC was rostered to fly return flights from Kuala Lumpur to Denpasar, Beijing, Melbourne and then Denpasar again.”
So it’s possible the simulator data was used to plan a diversion of MH150, which never occurred.
@Miden
I agree with Victor, if all of the simulator data (a lot of which is still being held secret) had been disclosed, it would have been shocking that a flight to Saudi Arabia was targeted. The sim data must be viewed (as nefarious or not) but if nefarious it suggests a plan that could be applied to various flight and departure times. And it took 2 years before we got any sim data leaked.
At some point we have to realize Malaysia was in cover-up mode from the start, and it seems obvious they had political and cultural difficulty with blaming their own pilot/people/airline.
@Victor
One area, I think in terms of what we would like to hear from USA (Boeing/FBI/NTSB/etc), especially in the face of books blaming USA for shooting down MH370, which is nuts, but:
(1) Does USA feel MH370 was pijacking? as France and OZ seem to. I assume the answer is yes indeed.
(2) Did FBI feel the sim data was suspicious? Probably yes, but USA misled the public when an unnamed Obama admin spokesperson said “nothing nefarious”. I assume the purpose of that spokesperson’s little “white lie” was to let Malaysia control the news flow, but of course Malaysia also said “nothing nefarious”. This might be considered the entire reason why MH370 went off the rails long term. The public needed to hear the truth in April_2014 when the data was analyzed, instead we got cover-up. Cover-up breeds conspiracy theories.
(3) Are the social media rumors true: eg: especially re: distress call picked up by USA, and other purported items.
(4) Boeing we could benefit from much, but in particular debris analysis to help determine the nature of the crash and implications. Of course, Malaysia would probably at least have to agree to that assistance.
@TBill: I don’t know how any American politician can gain a political advantage by opening up the MH370 can of worms. FdC levels some extraordinary accusations about the US, but few people here take those accusations seriously, if they are even aware of them. Meanwhile, the FBI won’t disclose any details into their work because they claim there is an open criminal investigation.
In a nutshell, I see little new information coming from US officials, as well as from Boeing.
@Bill Thank you for the summary of Dennis’ position on this matter. I had a similar list but yours is more complete. I am in Dennis’ camp on pretty much all those points. Except the end. I don’t believe that ZS would have intentionally crashed because his demands were not met. I cannot see the point, unless he was working with a group and he wished to ensure the integrity of any future ultimatum. There is no evidence that he was working with others. Perhaps he was ‘bluffing’ and the authorities called his bluff – so he lost – but why crash the plane – land somewhere and surrender. That could put the matter even more in the public eye than an unexplained crash.
Perhaps there was an accident within the diversion. Could ZS have misjudged his fuel? He could have been under tremendous pressure – perhaps even from passengers storming the cockpit.
No note or message from the perpetrator has been published. I believe that with today’s technology, a technically capable person such as ZS would have been able to ensure that something got out following an intentional crash. It would be very naïve to leave the entire narrative in the hands of the Malaysian authorities. So probably there was no message – perhaps because he fully expected to live through the event. For that reason, I have doubts about a far south termination.
@Victor Are you satisfied that the ‘pings’ that were reported by the Haoxin 01 and the Ocean shield were adequately considered? They did occur near the 7th arc, near the time that the batteries were due to go dead and the water there is 4.5 Km deep, probably deeper than the operating limits of these beacons – so weak, intermittent reception would be expected. I know there was an ‘explanation’ that the Haoxin detected could have been caused by an on-board spare receiver – seems unlikely to me. And we know that it is possible to miss wreckage with those search techniques.
@Shadynuk asked: Are you satisfied that the ‘pings’ that were reported by the Haoxin 01 and the Ocean shield were adequately considered?
Yes.
Just wondering:
if the black boxes are ever recovered, what can we hope to learn about the “who”, “why”, and “how”?
@Shadynuk: If the captain or collaborators made demands while in the air that they expected to be accepted, it was a horribly conceived plan that had little chance of success. If on the other hand the plan was to hide the plane deep in the SIO, it was brilliantly planned and executed. The two flaws in the plan were the recorded Inmarsat BTO and BFO data (which locates the plane in the SIO near the 7th arc), and the simulator data (which suggests pre-meditation of the disappearance).
@Victor Thank you for the response. Perhaps you are correct. As you say, there was likely no expectation that the SDU would come back on the air. So the expectation could have been that the aircraft simply disappeared and the only evidence would be perhaps some radar tracks and perhaps some wreckage (if found) that indicated a crash into the sea. That could leave an enormous uncertainty and area to search.
As it stands now, I think the plan (if to damage the government by creating a ‘mystery’) failed completely. The government remained in power for some time and was removed for reasons unrelated to this event. It is probably accurate to say the ZS’s reputation was damaged more than that of the government. Corruption continues unabated.
When sending a message with such a cost, don’t you think that ZS (if he) would have taken steps to be certain that his message got out? I agree that hiding the aircraft was very successful – but what was achieved? I agree that the deep south terminus is well supported by the data (except perhaps for some ‘odd crinkles’ in the flight path) but, what did it accomplish?
Happy Easter.
@Shadynuk: As part of the mystery he created, perhaps he did not want the “who” to be known, in which case there would be no message.
@ David Victor TBill
Thank you for your replies. In my humble opinion, the simulator evidence is incriminating, but remains inconclusive, because the earliest and most critical parts of the routes are totally different.
The insufficiency of the existing simulator evidence is further demonstrated by speculation that the captain may have practiced flying more similar routes that were unretrieved, and may have been planning to divert a different flight. If the existing simulator evidence applied 370 were as ironclad as many claim, there would be no need for such speculation.
@Miden Agan: If we consider the simulator data without reference to other evidence, I’d say:
Incriminating: Yes.
Beyond reasonable doubt: No.
Several TV shows and movies, based on the disappearance of MH370, have been made. The most well known is the TV show Manifest, which veers into the realm of fantasy for most of the episodes.
However, DEPARTURE is one TV show that is remarkably faithful to most of the well known facts about MH370.
“Departure is a 2019 British-Canadian suspense drama television series commissioned by Canadian broadcaster Global. NBCUniversal pre-bought the series with an intent to air on Universal TV…. Departure premiered on Universal TV on 10 July 2019”
The show co-stars the late Christopher Plummer as Howard Lawson, the senior manager of the (fictional) Transportation Safety Investigation Board.
The basic premise of the show is the unexplained disappearance of British Global Air flight 716 over the N. Atlantic, and the investigation surrounding the event. Most of the plot-twists over the course of six episodes explore the various theories about what happened to the plane. They focus on issues such as locating the crash site using the plane’s satellite ‘pings’; the marital infidelity of a possibly suicidal pilot; the blame game between the aircraft manufacturer, the airline, and it’s subcontractors; hijacking by middle-eastern terrorist travelling on false passport; the involvement of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies (Mo**ad); electronic hijacking; and possible profit taking via the stock market by a ‘Russian’ oligarch.
Some of these plot lines are well known to those familiar with MH370.
But WHAT IF some of the other plot twists revealed on the show are equally applicable to MH370, but totally hidden and unknown to the world?
– What if the pilot or copilot of MH370 was actually bi-sexual/gay in muslim majority Malaysia?
– What if there was a plot to hijack, divert, and ditch MH370, involving former military pilots, travelling as passengers with stolen/false passports provided by the Mo**ad, and working for a East European oligarch?
– What if the stolen passports used by the 2 Iranians on board MH370 were also supplied the Mo**ad?
– In the show, the Iranian pilot who takes control of the plane turns out to be the good guy only after the 5th or 6th episode. These last 2 episodes were not available on YouTube, but the first 4 episodes were available. What if the IRGC got pissed-off that through this show, Iran was getting the blame for hijacking MH370, and targeted UIA 752 as revenge? More than half the passengers on board were Canadian residents.
The ‘Russian’ oligarch in the show is named Pavel Bartok. Pavel is a common first name in Russia, but Bartok is distinctly Hungarian. Noone can listen Classical music radio without failing to encounter regularly the distinct compositions of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok. Therefore, the choice of that name is probably not accidental but intentional on the part of the writers of the show. There are not many billionaires in this world with Hungarian last names who happen to take advantage of the vagaries of the stock market to enrich themselves, and who also have a history with Malaysia.
In the TV show, ‘Bartok’ offers to supply the undersea search vessel which ultimately locates the blackboxes of the aircraft. JW once wrote a blog post about one of the investors in Ocean Infinity who happened to be a partner in a big London hedge-fund that got it’s initial start with the help of a certain well known Hungarian-born billionaire.
Anyways, if you have VPN, you can watch all 6 episodes on the website of Global TV channel, registration not required.
@Miden Agan: Are you “Alvian Aldebron” on Facebook?
@Shadynuk
As far as Razak admin surviving the political impact of MH370, I speculate a couple of things.
Firstly, although just about everyone universally agrees that Malaysia did a terrible job handling MH370, I observe Razak handled it extremely well from the viewpoint of keeping his job. Malaysian’s do not accept that their pilot could have done this, so Razak had to respect the prevailing domestic cultural/political denial, and that approach seemed to work well for him.
More recently, I have a new speculation, that the original ZS plan may have been to hijack MH150 (or MH168) to Jeddah to protest Saudi Arabia’s funding of 1MDB and Razak. If that had happened, that would have been more obvious that ZS planned the mission as a protest. For some unknown reason, taking MH150 did not happen (I speculate possible MH150/MH168 schedule changes internally known to MAS) and ZS ended up taking MH370. Taking MH370 to some extent is unclear re: the “why” question, but ZS was experiencing personal difficulties (per Victor above) and Anwar was just found guilty that day, such that as fate would have it, MH370 became the actual “acting out” flight.
@TBill: Could be.
Hello!
If I change the topic of discussion, will I be lynched outright?
I have some recent discovery work that has not seen the light of day prior to now.
Regards WAH…
@WAH: If you have relevant information, please present it.
Hello everyone…
Here is a story being aired for the first time (mostly)…
I was very involved in the search for Lisa Ann/Cobra Amber during most of the nineties. This was an even bigger mystery than the triple seven. The loss of a hundred million dollar technical jewel in ’69 so big they couldn’t hush it up. “Cargo Plane lost in Bering Sea” they said…
That has *nothing* directly to do with how I came into this “arena”, as Nixon would put it.
Monday morning, the tenth, I got a phone call from a friend I literally had not spoken to in a decade. He asked me if I was aware of the missing plane. I was following it, but for none of any of these reasons – but we shall set that fully aside for now – too deep that rabbithole…
Well, we had both worked for a firm in Costa Mesa in 2001 – before the ripple effect of the dot-com mess shut down the project we were working on – the “Superouter” that was *supposed* to go toe to toe with Cisco. (“Ha” on that one…)
Turns out, I was “stage dressing” for an ongoing pump n’ dump stock hustle. So was my buddy, but he knew this going in – I actually thought it was on the up and up. Silly me!
A few weeks before the plane went poof, their stock started to move – insider buying – and LONG. A lot – enough for my friend to notice a priori. Now, this will sound fairly fringey, but this firm had some very questionable connections. One of the patent attorneys there had (I heard) worked for the Rose Law firm in Little Rock – on patents…
I will leave this for all readers to commit for themselves as necessary. Research “Solid State Rate Gyro”, and all the vested interests therein. This will run you into the Conspiracy Channels like a homing beacon. (More on that later.) I **know** these people had connections: I *literally* held the door open for the Sec. of Defense for Clinton and his entourage when I worked there !
In retrospect, the nine ‘leven episode had numerous facets to the action – including stock fraud – so these ops are expected opportunities for the informed. That said, I can state with **absolute certainty** that the cargo on that plane was a big, big, big prize for someone – parties unknown, reasons unknown.
It also appears the entire episode did not go down as planned. This seems to have been a triple-cross, executed with military precision. Near perfect I might add…
From here, the story goes into the ethers – but exceptionally technical – and mostly provable even. Anybody brave enough to listen?
I can guarantee it will be unique and entertaining, if nothing else…
WAH…
@WAH: Again, if you have relevant information related to the disappearance of MH370, please present it.
I’m getting there. Nice to see some interest.
Continuing, I was introduced to this mystery from day-one as a skeptic and very suspicious of all aspects. I was also one of the designers of the HADR radar system the Malasians use. It is still in service – since ’86 – and all others of the vintage were replaced a long time ago. That was how we did things – I worked for Uncle Howard – but oddly, only after his death, and for the next two decades.
I know radar – I have half a dozen patents on Phased Array technology – for fact.
The Malaysians I have spoken to luv me. From my unique perspective, I understand the utter brilliance that Shah exhibited with his execution. His understanding of how to spoof both primary and secondary radars was – well – epic.
I personally think that most of the world has no full understanding of the character of this man. I hope everything finally comes out – and his name is cleared.
I approached my studies here from an unusual perspective. The over-arching pattern of this entire episode has made the plane look like it had disappeared into a Black Hole (and I have seen folks that truly believe this!) Working backwards from “perfection” [ i.e. no trace of plane whatsoever ], those items that deviate from this perfection are the only ones not studied enough.
These three “leaks” point us to where we need to go.
First, the gradual release of debris for more than two years after loss – but nothing for the first 18 months. It would appear something changed during that time – say a wreck on an unstable substrate shifting with tides and wave actions. That would explain the bizarre barnacle conundrums, eh?
Reading between these lines, it seems the plane was very carefully placed somewhere it would not be disturbed, and it was placed there in essentially one piece. So the strange shattering patterns of the composite control surfaces could be explained by post-impact damage from the bottom – and from the nature of the barnacles – which will die past 250 feet in depth – the damage was likely from coral at the mesophotic water column levels. I betcha from Acropora (staghorns).
I have a decent graphic of the vector composites of the damages. How can I post this here? I suspect you will find it intriguing – and very plausible…
WAH…
@WAH: You are drifting all over the place, and not providing information.
Let’s do this a different way. You say that the captain spoofed primary and secondary radar. I know you do have a background in radar. Please explain how primary and secondary radar was spoofed. As far as we know, the transponder was put on standby, and primary radar from military and civilian radar captured the trajectory on the return trip over Malaysia. What we know is not consistent with your claims of spoofed radar data.
Okay. What was obvious to me, was that he skirted national boundaries so he would not trigger military interactions. Old, old trick, that one. Notice something interesting here – and I see this as not being coincidental in the slightest – the pilot did not begin to try and “ping steal” a shadowing target until he had left 3D radar space. Had he, there would have been immediate suspicion – and alarms would have gone off. Clever boy…
There are no 3D radars over the Andamans, (They *are* trying to buy one, BTW. I have a copy of the RFQ) Sri Lanka or southern India. Clearly he knew this. By the time he re-booted the SATCOM, he was out of range of the malaysian radars – but was still visible from Thailand (Thao Ban Duk and Phuket) for another fifteen minutes or so. We have not heard the exact specifics of this data. It would be nice.
He was dropping from 27K down to 15k as he approached Port Blair – I suspect he was using this to crowd his mach limit and catch up to the bogey he chose to shadow. From here to the Saudi peninsula, there was no radar operational that could separate two target that were on top of each other, but at 35k and 15k in elevation. The bogey at 35k had no idea there was a bird ping-stealing him from beneath!
Once reset and off radar, he shadowed a flight to the northwest – and there has been some very valid speculation it was SIA 68 – I have no problem with this stage – but I think the next of his jinks have been mis-interpreted.
I have my theories. We all do. Here is my version of his nav scenario:
KB@240> PR@270> ON@375> LS@222> PBR@397> ASL@330> DM@337> AT@360> HA@267> KD@260> NDG@300 ?
He never “hit” a transponder and left a signature behind, by using archaic tech. Brilliant and cunning…
Now for a “favor”…
INMARSAT and Dickenson, early on, released some data. They have references for their contacts, and these 4 I believe are beyond crucial. Can anyone get these packets – especially if de-coded?
124223 127831 127861 and especially 127906
This engine status data is my immediate quest…
Regards, WAH.
@WAH:
1) On the return trip over Malaysia, MH370 generally flew close to an airway which (then) straddled Malaysia and Thailand, and placed MH370 under the control of Malaysian ATC without ambiguity. If anything, it looked like other airliners.
2) What evidence is there that MH370 approached Port Blair? Most of us believe the turn to the south occurred well before that.
3) Not withstanding the difficulty of a commercially-trained pilot in a 777 to fly in the radar shadow of another plane, flying at 15,000 ft would require the plane to fly at around 390 KIAS to keep up with the plane at cruise altitude. This would be an overspeed condition (Vmo = 330 KIAS). Under Normal flight control, overspeed protection would kick in. If the flight control law reverted to Secondary or Direct, the overspeed condition would likely have caused structural damage.
4) There is no reason to navigate by NDB. GPS, INS, and VOR/DMEs would not leave a signature, and are much more accurate. Even if NDBs were chosen as waypoints, the navigation in a B777 would still occur using GPS, INS, and VORs.
5) Your path does not fit with the Inmarsat BTO and BFO data. What basis do you have for ignoring these data sets?
6) For four years, we’ve had the complete, unredacted satellite data for 9M-MRO for MH370 and MH371. All the engine health monitoring data has been decoded. There are no mysteries.
My patience is running out. You’ve yet to produce any new data, and what you have shared is not consistent with what we know.
I have a copy of the data myself…
So we begin here. Given the pilot had zero influence over the ADS-C transmissions – which had been programmed pre-flight to report on an hourly contract basis once the flight started. Ergo, each transmission would begin at 41 minutes after the hour. This is well accepted. These are those “pings”.
There was a missing transmission at 23:41 UTC, even though there had been one at 22:41, stating the plane was at 5K, immediately followed by an LDE indication at 22.47
There was no way for Shah to interrupt this chain of transmissions, which re- transmitted a couple of bizarre messages at 00:11 and 00:17 (I believe that is the accurate time.) These stated the engines were in some form of non-compliance – but the plane was responding again after the missed message at 23:41
Then a couple of minutes later, the infamous 00:19 log-on conundrum.
Now we dig a bit. The plane, as you can see in the data from INMARSAT, had been instructed at pre-flight programming to report ACARS back every other, even numbered hour, and the ADS-C got the hourly treatment. Specifically, these instructions set the satellite default for the outgoing calls from the plane to hit the Pacific satellite with the Hi-Gain, high bandwidth, high signal to noise antenna. You can see this in the last twenty packets. All outgoing calls went to the POR.
According to everything I have been able to find, and this is from INMARSAT themselves, as soon as the pilot entered the straits of Malacca, he was out of satellite range for the Pacific Satellite – especially on the mandated Hi-Gain/narrow beam channel – and indeed, about this time, no further transmissions from the triple seven were heard…
.. or were there some that have escaped scrutiny?
I refer you to that readout you have, and specifically the transmission of 124233. Here is the chain of handshakes indicating that the last failed attempt to contact the satellite happened at 22:50 – or four minutes after the LDE/turn prompt from the ADS-C. Thereafter, the plane was absolutely silent and inert for an hour and 15 minutes…
… and then it bitched about the dead right engine – and requested a log-on…
Huh?
Going back to the reason the ACARS and ADS-X were implemented was to make sure, that no matter what else came out of the reportage, beginning of flight, and end of flight messages would be available to airline management.
So irrespective of any other pre-programming, these messages **will** be generated.
Now your gonna get “torqued” with my next impossible statement.
I can perfectly plot out a scenario in which the 22:50 message, the one the satellite never received, was an end of flight report – meaning the dead engine/re-log on messages were actually generated, as mandated, to report a beginning of flight, just like the initial one of 115108 at 16:48.
Nawwww… This is just plain(plane) ol’ goofy, right?
I have seen this speculation floating around for years – but no one ever bothered to see what lined up with what. By itself, it does sound wacky.
You know your way around aircraft. If the message at 22:41 said 5K feet, and the next message of a turn was at 22:47 (correction on final approach, mebbe?), and if this concept is valid, it was on the ground at 22:50.
That’s 5k feet in 9 minutes – for a glide slope of 3 degrees and 625 feet per minute descent. Is this not a textbook landing? Just a coinky-dink?
I gotta ‘fess up now. I didn’t think I would be tolerated this long – so you have my appreciation – while I try and exude grandfatherly patience in the process.
The reason I “surfaced” after seven years of silence, was from exposure to a teeny factoid I had not known of for these several years.
I approach all data from a point of view of believability and conformance to known behavior. There are things which are possible – and those that are horribly unlikely.
You’re gonna throw a shoe at me now. I am gonna bring up Gaadhiffushi…
The “claim” from the Maldives does sound far-fetched, where at 6:15 local time, the island – and more specifically, the airport on Kuda Huvadhoo was buzzed by a plane that ** twenty** people identified as being a Malaysian airliner – at 500 to 1k feet, performing a *reckless*, ridiculously abrupt, turn at tree top level, changing course from 290-310 to 150-160 heading.
Sounds non-sensical, but these people were dead serious – and still are.
So what happened about Gaadhiffushi that made a difference now?
Another eyewitness of the plane – 60 miles away, fifteen minutes later, where she described watching the plane come almost directly at her – “A missile with wings” I think she said. Then it disappeared over the trees…
If we draw a line from the airport at Kuda Huvadhoo over to Gaadhiffushi on another atoll, [ heading 142 ] then continue on – the trajectory **precisely** intersects the next atoll south over their airport on Kadhdhoo.
That kind of correlation I notice. Then I looked more closely at the fly over target. There are only 5 NDBs in the entire Maldives – and one is here at the airport on Kadhdhoo. Somebody sure wanted to get here…
I totally believe the plane was on auto-pilot at this time – and it had been offloaded between 22:50 and 00:11. The stunt over both islands was convincing – this pro pilot wouldn’t fly like that – but the autopilot couldn’t care less. So the plane was programmed to be ditched somewhere to the south but slightly east of the Chagos Archipelago. Nobody dares to even think of looking there…
I won’t go into why I think this was so critical to someone’s plan. I am more perplexed with what happened to the passengers and crew.
**That** is the big mystery. I expected that some kind of witness protection plan would have fallen apart by now – but here I am clearly wrong. I haven’t the foggiest idea where they went/were taken. I try not to talk about it.
The plane is at 72.5 degree East, and 4.8 degrees South, in 100 meters of water – on coral. The target of the offload was around 72.5 East at 4.13 degrees North – on an **enormous** sandbar…
You want your shoe back? It won’t fit my big feet…
WAH…
@Victor
Your blog has attracted some amazing talent over the years. Unfortunately it’s now well into the loon-mating season, probably rivalling JWs high season [though here at least, the host is not one of the loons]. Perhaps a time-out, or a re-set to more rational, more focused what-we-know commentary?
I shan’t bother you further…
@WAH: You are jumbling so many things…ABS-B, ADS-C, ACARS, Satvoice, time out handshakes, log-ons…that unscrambling what you wrote would take time. If somebody wants to pursue this with you outside of this blog, do you have contact info you can share?
Victor: The nonsense written by WAH is not worth anyone’s time. 4.8S, 72.5E is in the southern Maldives. It’s 100% inconsistent with the hard facts, on par with FdC’s crap. Let’s move on.
@airlandseaman: If @WAH provides contact info, and if somebody wants to pursue this outside of this blog, they can.
Another possibility is for @WAH to contribute on the Facebook VeritasMH370 group, where all theories are considered equally probable.
Above, @WAH wrote “I can guarantee it will be unique and entertaining, if nothing else…”
Perhaps entertaining, in the mode of a fool. Certainly unique as it reflects nothing credible nor verifiable, merely a word and acronym salad that conveys only the ignorance of the author.
For other readers, take the inference to ADS-C. ADS-C is a position reporting protocol employed by ATC facilities, typically, when aircraft are in oceanic airspace. Unlike promiscuous ADS-Broadcast, ADS-Contract requires a datalink to be established between an ATC facility an an aircraft over which the reporting is established.
At no time during 9M-MRO’s operation during 7th-8th March was any ADS-C correspondence evident on the SATCOM datalink, nor any related ATC datalink services. It simply didn’t happen.
@VictorI
Perhaps this may have already been addressed previously, but I’d greatly appreciate a response.
According to CAPTIO’s website, if the SATCOM was shutdown via the FMC, there would be a ‘logoff’ signal sent to the Satellite. But there was no such ‘logoff’ reported.
FdC wrote on pg.357 “It so happens that at 2.25 am (18.25 UTC), as the plane started approaching Chinese airspace, its SATCOM started working again, as if the AWACS planes had decided to disperse rather than be caught on Chinese radar.
And according the Holland et al. paper titled “MH370 Burst Frequency Offset Analysis and Implications on Descent Rate at End-of-Flight” ,
At 18:25:27Z 7 March 2014, the Inmarsat GES in Perth received a SATCOM log-on request from 9M-MRO. A series of messages were exchanged in the following few minutes as part of a standard log-on sequence. The BFOs over those minutes displayed somewhat unusual behavior in that (barring the first BFO) the BFO appeared to be exhibiting a transient settling behavior. This is shown in Fig. 6. It was noted in [1] that the spike in BFO observed at this time was not fully understood and whilst originally attributed to a possible aircraft maneuver it could also be related to actual frequency changes occurring during the logon sequence. A subsequent study by the SATCOM sub-group of the MH370 Flight Path Reconstruction Group revealed this was most likely due to power-on frequency drift and subsequent stabilization of the oven-controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO) in the SDU.
Questions:
1. how unusual are they really, these BFO values which were recorded at 18.25?
2. Does the fact that the BFO values were unusual at the 18.25 logon, and MH370 would have been approaching Chinese airspace at about this time suggest that the aircraft was actually not in the Malacca Strait, but actually close to Northern Vietnam?
3. All SATCOM communications were with the IOR satellite, not the POR satellite. But had the aircraft continued on it’s normal journey without being diverted, would these communications have switched to the POR satellite at some point in the journey?
4. according to the Holland paper, “the spike in BFO observed at this time was not fully understood and …. could also be related to actual frequency changes occurring during the logon sequence.” Does this suggest that the SATCOM was on a different frequency during the ‘black out’ period from 17.07 to 18.25?
CMR:
“According to CAPTIO’s website, if the SATCOM was shutdown via the FMC…”. But that did not happen. The AES was shut down by shutting off the 115VAC power. That is why there was no logoff.
The BFO values between 18:25 and 18:28 were NOT unusual. They were typical for values recorded during the first few minutes after a cold restart. It is predictable. They had nothing to do with approaching Chinese airspace.
The AES would normally stay on one satellite unless the elevation angle became low, or traffic demand became an issue. During MH371, the AES did switch between the POR and IOR satellites several times. The crew could select either satellite manually.
The “spike” (actually, an exponentially decaying sinusoid peak) at 18:25 is well understood. It was caused by the OCXO warming up. Holland may not have understood it early in his investigation, but he eventually did understand it after Thales ran tests showing that it was common for the cold startup. It can be observed in the MH371 cold start data too. The frequency error was small compared to the FDMA channel spacing, so no, it was not on a different channel.
@CMR: I agree with all of @airlandseaman’s comment. I’ll also add that the BFO value at 18:28 after the frequency stabilizes is consistent with a flight at 500 kn on the same course as N571 (296T). There is no evidence that MH370 was anywhere other than where we believe it was in the Malacca Strait.
@VictorI & ALSM,
If the SATCOM was depowered by ‘shutting off the 115VAC power,’ then why do all official reports say that ACARS was shut down?
… and how was the aircraft powered between 17:07-18:25? Is it via APU as CAPTIO suggested, or was it a partial shut down of the power distribution system?
CMR: You are conflating the act of shutting off power to the satcom hardware (AES) with turning off one software function (ACARS) running in an independent computer. Both of those things happened, probably at the same time circa 17:22. When the power was restored to the Left Main AC bus at 18:23, the AES logged on, but ACARS was disabled for the remainder of the flight.
It is very likely that the PF disabled ACARS to prevent tracking, but turned off the Left Main bus power (the power source for the AES AND many other loads) for a different unrelated reason, and was unaware that by turning off that bus, he was turning off power to the AES.
Both Main engines continued to generate power. The APU did not come on until MEFE circa 00:17:30.
All of this has been known and extensively discussed for the last 6 years.
@CMR again references something “FdC wrote on pg.[…]”
No matter how often the author of ‘The Disppearing Act’ might implore prospective readers to believe that the book is a true story, it is simply the converse. There is no investigative rigour involved, it’s a collection of suppositions contrived into a fiction.
However, in response to references and questions in your comment above:
Attributed to CAPTIO, “if the SATCOM was shutdown via the FMC“. The FMC has no capability to shutdown SATCOM service. Much of CAPTIO’s writing is premised on incomplete or erroneous understanding.
Your Q3, “had the aircraft continued on it’s[sic] normal journey“, or even the path speculated in ‘The Disappearing Act’, at 1825UTC 9M-MRO’s location on that path would place it in within the POR service area. However, at 1825UTC 9M-MRO logged on to the IOR GES, the BTO (range) puts it on a generally N-S line of position that lies west of waypoint MEKAR, subsequent to the aircraft passing over Pulau Perak at 1802UTC which is consistent with the last PSR report from the Penang-Butterworth Terminal Area Radar recorded at 1800UTC.
@ALSM, Don Thompson, VictorI… Thank you! BTW, did you watch ‘Departure’?
@CMR: No.
@Don Thompson
“The FMC has no capability to shutdown SATCOM service. Much of CAPTIO’s writing is premised on incomplete or erroneous understanding.”
I find it curious that CAPTIO’s scenario of MH370 flying on APU after main power generators were shutdown is very similar to what supposedly happened to MH066 on Mar 23, 2014.
Perhaps CAPTIO’s understanding is based on how an FMC works in an Airbus A330-300, and not a B777-200?
@ALSM
“You are conflating the act of shutting off power to the satcom hardware (AES) with turning off one software function (ACARS) running in an independent computer. Both of those things happened, probably at the same time circa 17:22. When the power was restored to the Left Main AC bus at 18:23, the AES logged on, but ACARS was disabled for the remainder of the flight.”
I’m not conflating, just the opposite, I’m seeking clarification. IF ACARS were to be shutdown by the hijackers, based on what is public knowledge, it would probably have to be around the same time as the transponder shutting down.
– But we are simply inferring this because there was no 1/2 hourly report of the ACARS at 17:37, right? After all, we don’t really know what transpired between 17:22 and 18:25.
– What if, as FdC suggested, there was one or more AWACS aircraft ‘shadowing’ MH370, and what if these aircraft are able to ‘hijack’ the datalink between MH370 and the Inmarsat satellite, sort-of like a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, when an attacker intercepts communications between two parties either to secretly eavesdrop or modify traffic traveling between the two?
The transponder was switched-off at 17:21, probably by the captain who was collaborating with the ISR mission of the AWACS. But if there was an AWACS aircraft shadowing MH370 from 17:21 to 18:25, it could very well have relayed an ACARS transmissions at 17:37, and/or there could very well have been communications between MH370 and the outside world upto 18:25.
We are attributing the ‘spike’ in BFO values at 18:25 to the OCXO warming up from a cold start, but we don’t truly know for how long the SATCOM was ‘cold,’ or even if it was ever shut down. Was it truly depowered between 17:21-18:25? Or was it turned off for much less time than that? We can’t be certain.
I’ve always found it curious that Minister HH confidently maintained in several interviews to Western media that the Malaysian military knew all along that the aircraft that turned back and flew over the Malay peninsula was a ‘commercial/civilian’ airliner. Either there was IFF transmissions from this aircraft, possibly because of its ISR role, or there was some communication between the aircraft and the outside world via the SATCOM during the ‘blackout’ period till 18:25. I’ve also found it curious that Malaysia is highly reluctant to share the military radar data, and that the radar tracked MH370 only up to 18:22 just 3 minutes before the SATCOM ‘reboot’ at 18:25.
@VictorI
FdC wrote on pg.353 “And it could further explain the oddities observed by some MHists who were watching the air traffic at the time on a loop on FlightRadar24 in that patch of the sky. Not only was a very fast point visible, strangely identified as KAL672, crossing the sky much faster than all the other planes, but it was also noticed that when MH370 disappeared from the screen, several other flights that were nearby simultaneously disappeared as well. The only difference was that, unlike MH370, the other flights reappeared a little while later.“
It’s well known that the US Navy carries out GPS degradation exercises to test operational readiness in a GPS denied environment. It is also well known that lack of GPS signals could impair the functioning of ADS-B, resulting in the transponder symbol dropping off ATC screens.
It was reported that USS Pinkney & USS Kidd were in the area of S.China Sea when MH370 disappeared from radar.
– could the USN have degraded the GPS signals to momentarily allow MH370 to switch off it’s transponder, only for it to be reappear again from an AWACS aircraft shadowing MH370, and spoofing MH370’s hexcode and transponder symbol?
@CMR wrote “I find it curious that CAPTIO’s scenario of MH370 flying on APU after main power generators were shutdown is very similar”
It’s in no way similar. Most obviously, MH0066 was operated by an Airbus A330, MH0370 by a B777.
MH0066 continued after a non-normal event to make a precautionary landing at Hong Kong without further incident. MH0370 continued to its terminus in the sIO.
BTW, the APU simply powers another “main” generator. You appear to be imbuing it with inordinate importance.
Please refer, again, to my advice regarding ‘The Disappearing Act’ and CAPTIO.
SJ-182 CVR downloaded:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/asiapacific/2021-04/13/c_139877469.htm
Introduction of cockpit video recorders unlikely:
https://runwaygirlnetwork.com/2021/04/12/alpa-opposes-cockpit-video-recorders-despite-continued-ntsb-push/
@CanisMagnusRufus
RE: “Perhaps CAPTIO’s understanding is based on how an FMC works in an Airbus A330-300, and not a B777-200?”
Pilots use Control Display Units (CDU) to control the FMC and SATCOM systems on both the B777 and A330 aircraft. The CDU is sometimes erroneously called the ‘FMC’, when in fact it is simply an interface that allows the pilots to access and control the separate systems.
RE: MH066
The A330 has two engine driven generators (IDG) and an APU generator. Normally, the IDGs power the aircraft any time the engines are running, however, the APU generator can be used as a backup if one of the IDGs is inoperative. The failure of a single IDG in-flight would not normally require a diversion, as the aircraft would still have two independent AC power supplies available. I don’t know the details of what happened in the case of MH066, however, it’s possible the aircraft dispatched with one of the IDGs inoperative, which is allowed under the MEL. In that case, the APU would have been left running throughout the flight to provide a second power source. The in-flight failure of either of the remaining generators (IDG or APU) would require a landing at the nearest suitable airport, as the aircraft would only have one AC power source remaining.
CMR: Call it conflating, or call it confusing…either way you have the facts scrambled.
Re: “But we are simply inferring this because there was no 1/2 hourly report of the ACARS at 17:37, right? After all, we don’t really know what transpired between 17:22 and 18:25.” Not true. We also know that the phone call at 18:03 went un answered (no AES response), thus we know the AES was not on at that time. If it was on, there would have been an AES response regardless of whether the call was answered.
Re: “We are attributing the ‘spike’ in BFO values at 18:25 to the OCXO warming up from a cold start, but we don’t truly know for how long the SATCOM was ‘cold,’ or even if it was ever shut down. Was it truly depowered between 17:21-18:25? Or was it turned off for much less time than that? We can’t be certain.” This is simply horse shit. Everything in this statement is not true. Not a single shred of evidence to support your statements. Plenty of evidence to refute them.
Your repeated nonsense here is really polluting the discussion. You have contributed absolutely nothing factual.
@David: That’s great news about SJ-182’s CVR.
@Andrew said: Pilots use Control Display Units (CDU) to control the FMC and SATCOM systems on both the B777 and A330 aircraft. The CDU is sometimes erroneously called the ‘FMC’, when in fact it is simply an interface that allows the pilots to access and control the separate systems.
It gets even more confusing. If I recall, the CDU gets you access to some SATCOM parameters, but setting one of the MFDs to COMM mode is the way to manage the ACARS parameters.
@Victor
Yes, the CDU is used to directly manage the SATCOM for voice calls, manual log-on/log-off, diagnostic functions, etc. On the B777, the MFD COMMS pages are used to manage datalink functions such as ACARS, ADS-C and CPDLC, which use SATCOM as the ‘carrier’.
@Victor and All:
Very sad to learn about Dennis Workman’s death. Thank you for having passed your condolences to his loved ones.
@TBill
« in memory of Dennis- … I made some personal notes …my take on what DennisW believed about MH370. »
Thanks for your nice lively summary: yes Dennis was an enthusiastic contributor.
@Don Thompson
“Much of CAPTIO’s writing is premised on incomplete or erroneous understanding.”
Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle’s wrote the story of the Tooth of Gold in his book Histoire des oracles (1687): “… but they began by writing books and then they consulted the goldsmith…”
CAPTIO never sustained that the FMC would be able to switch off the SATCOM.
Also, quoting Jacques Attali who wrote in one of his books: “to distinguish between opinion, fact and believe”…
By the way, have you noticed that the last IG report presents a trajectory exploiting some prior original elements coming from CAPTIO reports some years back. Examples: after arc1, the contingency procedure (offset followed by a descent) to pass under routes N571 and following, or the identified Indigo traffic (30min ahead of schedule) coming ahead to MH370, which probably put some pressure on the PIC.
We are happy to have contributed there 🙂
@Jean Luc
Thank you for the quotes, I’ll add the sources to my reading list.
I have not compiled a complete reference to CAPTIO’s work, hence, my non-specific comment, above, to CMR.
Regarding “the contingency procedure (offset followed by a descent)“. Did CAPTIO detail that idea prior to 2015-04-29? On that day the host of this blog introduced discussion of the manouevre in another blog.
@Don Thompson: Looking back at historical communications, I see that Barry Martin (CPL) proposed a lateral offset to N571 back in November 2014. Since then, a number of investigators have incorporated this element in their reconstructed paths.
@CAPTIO
“One technical fact led us to believe that a third party was involved rather than the pilot: if the pilot had wanted to close all communication channels, including the Satcom, he could have turned of the Satcom through his FMC interface. But this would have sent a logof message to Inmarsat, resulting in a “clean” disconnect of the system. But what happened instead was an abrupt shutdown of the Satcom connection, followed by an automatic reconnection about one hour later (when the electric power was turned on again). Why would a seasoned pilot take the risk of a complete shutdown of the main electric power (a maneuver to be undertaken only in case of extreme emergency such as an engine fire) when a simple selection in an FMC menu would disconnect the Satcom?”
http://mh370-captio.net/wp-content/uploads/Journal_Winter_2019_web-CAPTIO-Article.pdf
CMR: “Why would a seasoned pilot take the risk of a complete shutdown of the main electric power (a maneuver to be undertaken only in case of extreme emergency such as an engine fire) when a simple selection in an FMC menu would disconnect the Satcom?”
First of all, there would be zero risk to the PF.
Secondly, if you are hijacking a plane, you don’t need a “conventional emergency” to cut the power to the main cabin.
Thirdly, as has been clarified here and elsewhere >100 times already, the PF cannot “…disconnect the Satcom…” from the FMC.
Cutting power to the Left Main AC bus is consistent with the several threads of evidence (civil PSR, mil PSR, 40,000 feet+ altitude at KB, restoring power at 18:23, …) indicating the PF depressurized the plane starting circa 17:22. So, there is a perfectly good reason to do it to a perfectly good airplane if your intention to to hijack the plane and eliminate the threat of anyone in the cabin calling on a cell phone or breaking through the cockpit door.
@Jean-Luc Marchand – CAPTIO
Thank you re: Dennis.
Interesting comment re: “…pass under routes N571 and following, or the identified Indigo traffic (30min ahead of schedule) coming ahead to MH370, which probably put some pressure on the PIC.”
I’ve never heard the “Indigo” air traffic mentioned as a factor before, but I assume that is one of the inbound N571 flights on your air traffic video?
More pesky aliens.Defense Department confirms leaked video of unidentified aerial phenomena is real
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/unidentified-aerial-phenomena-defense-department/index.html
@Paul Smithson: There is little doubt that governments are aware of the presence of UFOs. I think the real question is whether they know more, and whether the governments are willing to disclose some of what they know.
@VictorI …. There is little doubt that governments are aware of the presence of UFOs.
Really?
Nick Bostrom @ Oxford wrote a very insightful article on MIT Technology Review.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/04/22/220999/where-are-they/
It behooves every intelligent person to ponder the questions raised in this article.
Once again, CMR conflates things. UFOs are unidentified objects or images. That does not mean they are extraterrestrial.
@CMR: That article was written in 2008. I wonder whether his views have evolved now that governments are slowly acknowledging the existence of UFOs.
@airlandseaman: I agree that UFO does not equate with extraterrestrial.
What are your thoughts about these reports of UFOs, the military reports being what I consider to be the most credible?
Elon Musk had an interesting tweet on “The strongest argument against aliens”.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528
@Victor:
The US government certainly know more about UFOs than it is disclosing. This phenomenon is being studied in the private sector as well, a strategy that functions to legally protect R&D/information as “trade secrets” and shield against FOIA requests. Any country that has the ability to manipulate gravity and possibly space/time, as UFOs have repeatedly demonstrated, will dominate. Let’s hope it’s the US or at least a country with peaceful intentions.
Easy now Stuart.
@Paul Smithson,
An optical engineer friend and I have been analyzing the so-called triangular objects in the Navy video. First, the Pentagon gave no opinion on what that video showed, only that it was recorded on a U. S. Destroyer. I believe the images seen are a conventional aircraft and two stars. The aircraft shows a ~ 1 Hz strobe light in additional to continuous lighting. All three images show a triangular shape when the night vision device was zoomed in for highest magnification. It appears this triangular shape is actually the point spread function of the optical system in front of the image intensifier. I should also say that my friend and I built about 70 different intensified cameras for the Navy over a period of many years, so we are quite familiar with these devices.
The aircraft was at a considerable distance, and its angular size was small. It’s apparent angular rate as seen from the ship was also small. None of these 3 objects demonstrates any high angular speed or high acceleration. If you have a night vision device, as I do, and you use it to view stars and commercial aircraft at night, which I have done, you will be able to re-create the video with one exception. That is the very poor point spread function when at highest magnification. Most night vision devices have roughly round PSFs, not triangles. It would be trivial to determine if the triangular shape was, in fact, created in the particular optical device by inspecting a video, showing stars, made later in time and at maximum magnification.
@DrB. Thanks for that. Fascinating! And what do you make of the “trans medium” objects and those very fast moving targets shown in the earlier Navy videos?
Concerning UAPs, The Drive has published a relevent article.
(No opinion inferred!)
@Don Thompson: That’s a good article. (No opinion inferred…)
One important lesson we’ve learned from the MH370 saga is to not trust anybody’s interpretation of the data unless the data is made available and independently analyzed.
@Paul Smithson,
I have never seen anything indicative of a “trans-medium” object. I suspect these reports are part fantasy and part illusion.
Years ago I had a personal experience which demonstrated that a person can, in the right circumstances, misinterpret natural events. I am a trained astronomer (I was a tenured prof at the University of Arizona), and I have spent a good part of my like looking at the night sky. So, I knew the stars and planets very well. Now, one moonless night I was driving through a canyon in the desert. I noticed a bright light in the sky to one side of my general direction of travel. It seemed to come and go, but I got the very strong impression it was following me. No matter whether I stopped or continued moving, it was always there in the same direction. The light didn’t flash, and it wasn’t red or green, so it didn’t seem to be an aircraft. This went on for about an hour. Finally, when I exited the canyon and got into the open desert, I stopped and had a better look with binoculars. It turned out the “UFO” was Jupiter. The intermittent nature of the light was the fact that in some places canyon walls blocked my view. Because it was a moonless night, and my eyes were not fully dark adapted due to the car headlights, I could not see the canyon rim. So, initially I got completely fooled by seeing a very ordinary sight in somewhat extraordinary circumstances. Once my brain decided the object was following me, I could not shake that conclusion until after I cleared the canyon and obtained a better view.
Regarding the “fast moving objects” in the Navy targeting videos, your perception of speed may be quite wrong. First, the platform (the aircraft with the targeting pod) is moving at a high speed. That makes it more difficult to determine if the object is moving at all. Second, we don’t know how far away the object is. That also makes it very difficult to determine the object’s speed. The information needed to determine the object’s speed perpendicular to the line of sight is to know the object’s distance, the aircraft 3-D velocity vector and the targeting pod’s angular velocities in 2-D. So, there are six variables, and we don’t know any of them. Now, the objects seen above the sea surface in some of the videos may give the impression the object is moving fast, but that’s only because you are assuming that you, as the observer, are sitting still (which the aircraft is not). So, the apparent speed of the object with respect to the ocean waves depends on how far out from the aircraft the object is along the line of sight from the aircraft to the sea surface. If the object were near the sea surface, then its motion relative to the ocean waves would be dominated by the object’s speed, not by the aircraft speed. However, the closer the object is to the aircraft, the more the aircraft speed dominates the apparent motion between the object and the sea surface. If the object were near the aircraft, its apparent angular rate relative to the sea would be extremely high (appearing to be even higher than the aircraft’s speed), even if the object were stationary. So, even stationary objects will generally appear to have a high angular rate of motion relative to the sea surface, if the object is several thousand feet or higher in altitude. One of the Navy videos shows a small object with the sea surface appearing to move upward and to the right. I believe this display is always rotated so that up in the video is always toward zenith and L and R are correct. So if the sea surface appears to move up and to the right, the line of sight is actually being tracked down and to the left. I interpret this to mean the object was at a lower altitude and was being approached on the left/port side of the aircraft. If the aircraft were at FL200 and the object were at FL100, the apparent speed of a stationary object relative to the sea surface would appear to be the same as the aircraft speed. So, I suspect most of the apparent speed is simply the aircraft motion relative to a nearly stationary object al lower altitude. So, we see that the apparent motion of the object relative to the sea surface may entirely be a result of the aircraft speed, not a result of object speed. Again, if the altitude/distance of the object were known, and if we knew the angular rates of the targeting pod’s line of sight, and if we knew the aircraft’s velocity, we could determine the object speed. My guess is that is was probably very slow. The illusion of high object speed is probably due to aircraft speed and the viewing geometry.
@VictorI
The story about the co-pilot’s cell phone connecting with a cell phone tower in Penang was released on Apr 12, 2014 in the NST news website. Later, Malaysian authorities tried to replicate this event with a reconstruction excercise and were unsuccessful.
FdC writes on pg.297 “So despite being breaking news at the time, strongly in support of the idea of a U-turn and flight over Malaysia, this information was never proven to be true either. The official report, one year later, dropped this ‘clue’ altogether and made no mentioon of it at all. With the benefit of hindsight, together with the understanding that MH370 was never picked up by the Malaysian radars, this co-pilot’s phone-connection anecdote seems to have all the hallmarks of a fake story, planted early enough in the people’s brains to try to put flesh on the bones of the flight over Malaysia scenario.”
According to REUTERS Apr 12, 2014 Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the report. The New Straits Times quoted acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein as saying that the report needed to be verified.
But he appeared to cast doubt on the report by saying: “If this did happen, we would have known about it earlier.”
The New Straits Times cited separate investigative sources as saying that a signal had been picked up from Fariq’s cellphone, but that it could have resulted from the device being switched on rather than being used to make a call.
QUESTION: which is more probable: somebody spoofing the IMEI of co-pilot’s cellphone from the ground, OR the cell phone actually connected to the cell tower while flying over the area? Or did someone hack into the database of the cell tower’s logs, and key in an entry?
@CMR: There is confusion between completing a call, i.e., getting the dialed phone to ring, and for the cell phone to successfully register on the tower.
I’ve had a cell phone register on a tower while flying at 35,000 ft, although I was unable to make a phone call.
I have little doubt that the First Officer’s cell phone registered on the tower on Penang Island as MH370 flew to the south of Penang Airport.
@VictorI
But isn’t curious that this ‘leak’ to the media of the co-pilot’s cell phone connection came after Mike Mckay’s sighting of a ‘burning object’ in the S.China Sea was reported on Mar 12, casting doubt on the turnback theory?
CMR: FdC is just making up another 100% false story because her whole theory goes up in smoke unless she can some how discredit the facts, especially the cell phone registration data at 17:52:27. The news reports are irrelevant. They only reported what they knew at the time. More came out later, ignored (hidden) by FdC.
Re:
1. ” …this information was never proven to be true either.” This is a false statement. We know it is a true story because the cell phone company produced records showing it happened, as noted in the RMP reports. And suggesting the records were somehow fabricated is pure BS. Zero basis.
2. “…together with the understanding that MH370 was never picked up by the Malaysian radars…”. This is also a false statement. In fact, it is idiotic, and FdC knows that. She is simply lying. We have in hand from multiple independent sources both military and civil MY radar data. We know from that radar data 9M-MRO was at the point of zero Doppler shift (flying orthogonal to the aircraft to cell site line at 17:52:27) when the phone registered. That is exactly where you would expect a login connection to occur based on the physics. This has been widely reported.
3. As for the flight tests that were conducted, they only proved how incompetent the people conducting those test were. They tried to use a light twin with half the service ceiling and half the speed of a 777 and had the wrong test equipment on board in the first place. I wrote about this when the RMP files leaked. Geeez! They had the radar track. They should have conducted the test at the same altitude, speed and path. They did none of that.
Here is a paper written in 2017 providing a detailed analysis of the connection:
http://bit.ly/2DRZjo9
@CMR: There are many false witness reports of seeing MH370. We can be certain of that because most are conflicting.
There is a vanishingly small probability that the civilian radar data, the military radar data, the cell phone data, the satellite data, and the recovered debris were all fabricated evidence, which is what FdC wants you to believe. That would require close coordination among many people across multiple agencies in multiple countries. At the same time, I am not aware of ANY of the evidence she proposes is provably true.
At one point, I thought of writing an article that refutes her theory. However, there are so many claims to address that it would be a substantial amount of work to do a thorough job. I also doubt it would persuade anybody, because people that want to believe her theory are unlikely to change their mind.
@Don Thompson:
Thank you for the link. The author delivers an informative though highly mil-speak buzzword centric analysis. It is good that he leaves open the possibility that amongst the endless clutter there is the possibility that some of the UAP/UFO encounters cannot be explained. Evidence which merits further study exists though access to it is restricted, perhaps the most compelling is Predator-derived imagery captured over war-torn areas of the Middle East. In one particular video an unknown object can be seen darting about a Predator drone, changing direction and proximity to the drone/sensor instantly. Is the unknown object an adversary sent to collect data on surveillance efforts? Extremely unlikely due to the unknown object’s maneuverability.
@Stuart: What was your relationship with the Predator imagery showing UAP activity. Did you analyze it? Did you have access to it? What more can you share?
There is a lot of disinformation and attempts to discredit all the physical and scientific evidence of what happened to 370, and place the plane somewhere it can not be, such as the South China Sea.
Who is doing and supporting this and why ?
Miden Again: FdC is certainly one doing it. In her case, it appears to be for the purpose of selling a mystery thriller at the expense of truth and NOK.
A strange object in the sky just passed near my home in Virginia:
https://www.flightradar24.com/HBAL518/2769bc67
@Victor,
Is N258TH transmitting a WiFi SSID?
Or anything detectable.
@Don Thompson: Unfortunately, by the time I saw it on FR24, it was too far to detect a signal.
From The Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Hong Kong:
In 2018, de Changy’s French publisher sold the rights of Le Vol MH370 n’a Pas Disparu for an Anglo-French TV mini-series.
@Miden Agan
I can answer why so many obfuscation theories.
(1) To prevent this, NTSB knows they need to quickly advise public all the facts known and possible cause(s) relatively promptly. Example was Asiana Air 214 crash in San Fran where NTSB is accused of erring on the side of too much info and openness. Malaysia has taken the approach of complete cover-up and denial. That seeds doubt.
(2) Denial is huge factor in apparent pilot suicide cases, as noted in Wikipedia. In that region of the world, pilot suicide is never accepted: it is a cultural and political anathema. Conspiracy theories like FdC are comforting if you deny pijacking. I have a essay on 30 reasons for denial of pilot suicide, and I probably missed a few of the reasons.
This has been an interest of mine since about March 15, 2014 when former PM Najib Razak surprisingly disclosed likely intentional diversion as cause. I noticed none of the CNN contributors ever adopted that as even a possibility. I kept watching CNN coverage to see when they would start telling the truth, and they never did, saying it was probably a fire. CNN did better than Fox though (Fox had it up North).
Victor: It looks like that was a balloon flight that happened to be floating near 2^16 feet. Somewhere “in the pipe” between the altitude sensor and the FR24 reported data the altitude number was rolling over at 16 bits. If you add 2^16 to all the low altitude values, you get a reasonable altitude vs. time plot.
Project Loon:
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/keep-your-eye-on-the-hbal-tracking-project-loon-balloons/
https://loon.com/
@airlandseaman: That’s cool, Mike. It didn’t occur to me that the altitude on FR24 was overflowing.
@Andrew: Thanks for providing the link for those not familiar with Project Loon. About a year ago, I had several balloons pass near me in Virginia. What I didn’t realize until today is that Google decided in January to shut down the project.
@ALSM/ VictorI/ Miden Agan
I think we are misunderstanding FdC’s intentions in writing this book. She’s given quite a few media interviews recently in relation to the release of her book, and whenever the interviewer asks point blank what really happened to MH370, FdC doesn’t sound at all convinced in her own theories of the S.China Sea shootdown.
Instead, I think what FdC has done successfully with this book is reveal a lot of hidden facts pertinent to the disappearance of MH370, while refraining from speculating too much. Compare her with NOK Ghyslain Wattrelos, who also leans towards the S.China Sea shootdown theory, but is also open to hijacking to the SIO theory.
MH370 disappeared at the time of the crisis in Ukraine.
Richard Q wrote about CNN’s coverage thusly,
If there was one person who is credited with driving this level of coverage for so long, it is Jeff Zucker. I asked Jeff directly whether we continued the depth of coverage for too long: “No. It’s a tremendous mystery. I get on an airplane all the time. I want to know what happened. There’s a lot of layers to this story, and as every day went by and it wasn’t solved, it became an even greater mystery, and so that is what I think made it a great story.”
To those critics who say CNN’s coverage of MH370 came at the expense of other important stories, such as the war and crisis in Ukraine, Jeff robustly answered: “We didn’t ignore the other major news story of the time that was going on, which was Ukraine. We gave more attention to Ukraine than anyone else. We had correspondents on the ground in Ukraine. Had we not been covering the airplane, I don’t think we would have given any more coverage to Ukraine. So I have no regrets.”
Here, the head of a major news organization admits that coverage of Ukraine was affected by MH370. It’s my observation that whenever MSM covered Ukraine, the order of the story was inevitably the annexation of Crimea by Russia, followed by the war in the Donbas, the sanctions on Russia, and peace talks. The Maidan revolution is provided as an explanation in the footnotes.
But this ‘partial’ truth prevents observers from asking, WHY did Russia annex Crimea? WHY was there a crisis in Ukraine in the first place? WHO was responsible for the overthrow of the pro-Russian regime in Kiev? etc.
Media coverage of the disappearance of MH370 prevented the public from asking these critical questions. So NO, the Russians didn’t hijack MH370 to distract the attention of the world away from Crimea. Instead, it may very well be those who launched the Maidan revolution who are also responsible for MH370’s disappearance. FdC may be fully apprised of this situation and may have wisely chosen to avoid bringing attention to that question by positing the S.China Sea shoot down theory.
CMR: You been drinkin’ Russian Kool aide? Or stirin’ it up yourself?
There are several lines of evidence pointing to the Ukrainian connection with MH370 in FdC’s book.
FdC wrote about the 2 UKR passport holders on pg.2.
The 2 Ukrainians arrive together, in the last few minutes of boarding, and they look far more energetic than their fellow passengers. They have the physiques of US Marines and wear body-hugging black T-shirts. Each has a large carry-on bag, and they whisk them on to the conveyor belt with practiced ease. I found out much later that their tickets were the only ones that were completely untraceable by the investigators. No idea where they were purchased, no travel agent, no method of payment, no place of issue. Highly abnormal apparently. The two men happened to be seated on row 27, right below the SATCOM antenna. Of all the passengers who board the flight, if you had to pick out two as being hijackers, the Ukrainians are the ones who best look the part, in terms of age, physical condition, appearance and body language.
On pg.12 There are some question marks over some other passengers including the sole Russian. In fact, all the countries that had nationals on the flight cleared them of any possible links to terrorism, with the exception of Russia and Ukraine, who ignored the requests made by the Malaysian police.
FdC wrote on pg.363
On Mar 8 2014, President Barack Obama was on a weekend family vacation in Key Largo, Florida. That’s where he was ‘briefed’ about the situation, according to Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman quoted by Bloomberg. On Sunday evening in Florida, Monday morning in Beijing, a phone call was arranged between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Obama. The Chinese government has a knack for picking annoying times to place calls as a way of expressing to their counterpart that the matter is of utmost importance.
The leaders of the two most powerful nations in the world don’t just pick up the phone to discuss the current state of world affairs, let alone a just-gone-missing plane, do they? This peculiar phone call seems slightly more in line with some kind of major bilateral crisis. According to several Chinese media sources, the situation in Ukraine was discussed during this call, but Xi Jinping also told his American counterpart that he was ‘deeply concerned about the safety of the people on board the aircraft, including Chinese and American passengers, and [that] China will continue to maintain close ties with the United States’.
Knowing that the Chinese censors meticulously redact the transcripts of these phone calls, I can’t help but find this exchange a bit odd. Why would the Chinese president express his ‘deep concern’ to his American counterpart about this missing plane? And then why state, immediately afterwards, that China will continue maintain close ties with the United States? Could this be the diplomatic translation of ‘we know what you have done but we are happy to negotiate’? Barack Obama for his part plainly expressed his condolences over the lost plane and stated that the US was willing to fully cooperate with China in the search and rescue effort. Considering the voracious appetite the media had for the MH370 story at the time, I was surprised to note that the few Western media outlets that did report the Xi-Obama phone call made no mention of the MH370 part of the conversation. But the explanation for this is simple: it is nowhere to be found in the White House official readout of the call. The president’s office decided to completely omit the discussion related to MH370. Why? Another case of erasing traces?
It looks like the Chinese side may have been a bit annoyed by the American ‘oversight’. Two weeks later, when the same two presidents were in the The Hague on the occasion of the third Nuclear Security Summit, they briefed the press ahead of a bilateral meeting that was to take place in the privacy of the US ambassador’s residence. The US president, who was the first to speak, seemed to mention everything he could think of, from climate change and nuclear security to the situation in Crimea, as well his wife and daughters currently sightseeing and playing ping-pong in China. But he did not say a word about MH370, which was still at the top of the world news agenda. When President Xi’s turn to speak came, in a clear attempt to set the record straight, the first item the Chinese leader brought to the world’s media attention was the fact that President Obama called him recently ‘to express sympathy over the missing Malaysian Airlines flight’. Xi Jinping also thanked Obama for ‘instructing relevant American agencies to join the search for the missing plane and to share information with the Chinese side’.
FdC wrote on pg.131
quoting the PI Ethan Hunt “Next came the MH17 crash in Ukraine: ‘800 planes used the same route and once again it is Malaysia Airlines that is hit. Do you think that is a coincidence: two identical jetliners from the same airline in four months? Statistically, that is impossible!’
FdC wrote on pg.80
In July 2014, Angus Houston was appointed as Australia’s special envoy to Ukraine for the investigation into the MH17 disaster. And in Jan 2015 he was given a knighthood, partly thanks to what was claimed to be his outstanding contribution to the MH370 search operation.
FdC wrote on pg.373
So, after the hypothetical downing of MH370 by the US, a civilian jet that carried mostly Chinese citizens, Putin tells Xi: ‘What happened is not acceptable. Leave it to me.’ It is payback time. And it takes place four months and ten days later. A twin plane to MH370 – same make, same model, same engines, same airlines, almost same name (9M-MRD vs 9M-MRO) – carrying almost sixty more people (298 against 239), this time mainly Westerners (Dutch, Australians, British …) gets shot down above Ukraine in pure Mafia style…. If Xi and Putin had to agree on this diabolical tit-for-tat scenario before the go ahead was given, the timing was perfect. The two leaders were together just a few hours before MH17 was shot down, on 17 July.
FdC wrote on pg.373
When I submitted [the scenario’s] basic outline to someone familiar with these sorts of undercover operations, I received two comments. First, the more outrageous the scenario, the more likely it is to actually be the truth. Second, because traceability is the major concern in these situations, most governments would use proxies. They would ask nation friends or professional groups to do a job on their behalf, to keep the game muddy. And when the time for dishing out blame comes around, the game may get even more muddy as the party that is wrongly blamed may choose, for its own reasons, to take responsibility for something it knows it did not do and that its accusers also know it did not do. The 1988 Lockerbie disaster is a case in point.
My Note: While investigating the Ukrainians, JW was referred to a well connected aviation attorney DF in San Francisco who represented them in the US, and who had previously worked on the Pan-Am case with the prestigious aviation law firm K&K in NY. The main partner of that NY firm is/was a major fundraiser for the current POTUS in the NY area.
@CanisMagnusRufus
You refer to an article targeted to an ATM audience which was not detailed and was limited in the number of words. I agree that reading it as it is, it could be misleading. In the text that you quoted, one has to read “the SATCOM function” that controls the com aspects (like Active or not etc.)and not the hardware aspects.
@airlandseaman
“indicating the PF depressurized the plane starting circa 17:22 “
I don’t want to start a debate here, just a remark: we don’t discuss the type of hijacking anymore, as there is too little info for sustaining one hypothesis or another. The depressurisation is one hypothesis.
“First of all, there would be zero risk to the PF…”
considering the LATAM flight on Dec 2018 there is always a risk that the Electrical Management System would not behave properly as this is an unusual operational situation…
“the PF cannot “…disconnect the Satcom…” from the FMC” : No discussion about that. It is known from the beginning that he can’t :-).
@all
More interestingly 🙂
In addition to existing other work, we studied Thousand of Inmarsat compatible straight line trajectories crossing ARC2 from latitude 5.8°N down to 3.35°S.
A straight line trajectory, i.e. constant speed and constant track direction (great circle), minimizes the number of trajectory variables to be considered.
Based upon the geometry of the system (the aircraft and the satellites i.e. the actual one and the virtual one), we analysed the BFOR behaviour as function of speed, track direction, position and time. We also came up with an analytic formula for the Inmarsat compatible straight line trajectories crossing Arc2.
All these numerous trajectories starting at latitude 5.8°N down to 3.35°S at Arc2 are equally probable and the resulting likely latitude at Arc7 is circa [~31°S;~39°S]
http://mh370-captio.net/wp-content/uploads/How_Many_Straight_line_trajectories_for_MH370-v1c.pdf
@Victor & ALSM,
N258TH now out over the Atlantic Ocean off the southern Delmarva Peninsula. ADSBexchange doesn’t suffer FR24’s apparent stored 16bit integer altitude snag (FR24 is reporting received alt OK in the aircraft info panel). I wonder how FR24 copes with LLMZ?
@CMR.
You appear lost, consumed among the long weeds.
Repeatedly quoting tracts of ‘The Disappearing Act’ does not render it any less of a fiction.
@Victor:
The video clip I mentioned previously was made by a coworker, captured during a medium-altitude UAV (Predator) mission feed over mountainous terrain in AF. During the clip the sensor operator was slewing the EO/IR camera 360 degrees to check the Predator drone for icing of the control surfaces and ensure the underwing ordnance was attached/intact. A bright object appeared, without an approach, and performed very rapid, irregular angular maneuvers, at some points disappearing then reappearing in a different location. Duration of this video clip was approx 15 seconds. I reviewed the clip several times in an attempt to identify the object, i.e. size, shape, proximity to the drone but could not explain it, nor could other personnel in attendance on the watch floor. The classification of the video feed /clip was SECRET//REL FVEY so there was dissemination amongst several coalition partner nations. According to the MOC (senior watch floor commander) this type of activity had been observed previously and the directive was to capture 15 sec clip and forward with appropriate annotation.
This observation of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is one of several that I experienced over the course of 20 years. While many argue that all UAP are either attributable to misidentification of military/domestic air-worthy craft or natural phenomena, I am convinced that there are many of unknown, probably other than human-engineered origin.
@Jean-Luc Marchand: A straight line trajectory, i.e. constant speed and constant track direction (great circle), minimizes the number of trajectory variables to be considered.
A great circle is not constant track.
@Don Thompson: I wonder how FR24 copes with LLMZ?
If altitude is represented as a 16-bit unsigned integer, that’s a good question.
What is the ADS-B format for altitude?
@Victor
Yes, our study is on great circles determined by the initial track direction at Arc2. Sorry for the wrong intro.
@Stuart: You said the drone operator was checking for icing. Does that mean there was visible moisture? Could some combination of moisture droplets, ice, precipitation, etc., have produced the artefacts?
@Jean-Luc Marchand
Thank you the new analysis.
That is very interesting but will take me a while to study fully.
I have a simpler but somewhat similar paper on just 2 straight paths.
Is there an implication that Captio is expanding focus beyond the orig Christmas Island scenario?
@Victor:
No, there is no chance that ice or any other weather phenomenon was responsible for the movement of the unknown object. The EO/IR sensor sweep by the sensor operator is performed routinely. In this case the sensor operator changed the zoom level to ascertain what the unknown object might be. The maneuverability demonstrated by the unknown object was far beyond known drone/drone swarms or other aircraft.
@Stuart: Thanks. It’s too bad independent experts are denied access to the data.
@TBill @Jean Luc et. al.
I appreciate the respectful discussion here, in contrast to the hostility I encountered on that other blogsite.
It would appear that this new CAPTIO analysis of the possible end point is overlapping some of the drift analysis and Inmarsat data analysis done by others.
31°S to 35°S.
This is a good sign.
@ VictorI
Richard Godfrey wrote in 2018
Even with a “HackRF One” from Great Scott Gadgets using a Software Defined Radio running over a L-Band Uplink at 1.647562500 GHz and a C-Band Downlink at 3.616062500 GHz, emulating an IOR-P10500-0-3859 Channel, it would be an impossible task to take over control of MH370 from seat 29A and fly it on a flight path to a predetermined location and at the same time spoof the Inmarsat data in near real time to another flight path and kid us all that MH370 is really in the Southern Indian Ocean.
– If we leave aside the mention of the remote take over of MH370, was RG serious when he wrote that an SDR can emulate ‘an IOR-P10500-0-3859 Channel’?
– If this is possible, then isn’t it also possible that an ISR/AWACS aircraft can ’emulate an IOR-P10500-0-3859 Channel’?
– wouldn’t this facilitate a sort of Man-in-the-Middle cyber interception of MH370’s datalink to Inmarsat satellites?
– would this require the assistance of someone on board the aircraft physically accessing the ‘SDU, which is housed in the E11 rack accessed through a ceiling panel on the left side of the door 3 cross aisle area’ as Richard G also wrote in the same comment thread?
@TBill: I think what CAPTIO is saying is that straight paths after 19:41 can’t be used to discriminate crash latitudes between 31S and 39S. I don’t take that as saying they believe the path was straight, but hopefully you receive a response.
@Victor
Agreed, but also if there a large error assumed in BFO, any flight path is quite unknown.
The way I look at it, (1) is the data good to use directly? or (2) is it just scatter, so we have a use a model that is not hitting the data points with good fidelity? Whereas a model “not hitting the data points” is justified if the data is in error. I am in Item#1 category, because I feel like the (BFO) data appears to me relatively good data.
I’d rather ask, what is the data telling us? If the answer is nothing, then we can assume data is bad and substitute for it with model or logic. But then we do not need me, because I am trying to read the data, because that is my approach/background.
@CMR: It’s possible that after the SATCOM was powered down, the satellite data was spoofed in real time, i.e., the data, frequency, and timing. That implies the radar data, cell phone connect, and recovered debris were all fabricated. As you’ve heard many times before, this kind of multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-agency, multi-geographic conspiracy would be so complicated that it’s nonsensical to seriously consider.
@VictorI
Sorry but I’m NOT talking about spoofing, nor remote take over of MH370.
The original intent of turning off the transponder was to allow another aircraft (ISR) to spoof the hexcode of MH370 while retaining the integrity of the datalink betw MH370 and the Inmarsat. To do this the ISR aircraft could emulate the IOR satellite.
The hijackers may have been aware of the transponder being turned off by the pilot, and took advantage of it.
@CMR: You said:
Sorry but I’m NOT talking about spoofing…
and then
The original intent of turning off the transponder was to allow another aircraft (ISR) to spoof the hexcode of MH370…
If somebody wants to pursue this further with you, perhaps you can discuss it offline.
An Indonesian submarine is lost in waters near North Bali.
https://news.trust.org/item/20210421074051-z0jon?s=09
@Victor
Would this be a good reason to search for MH370 again?
“The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed that airlines be required to address a Boeing 777 rivet issue that raises concerns about potential pressure loss.”
“The model 777–300 airplane had 23 solid rivet locations with missing manufactured heads,” the FAA adds.
That aircraft had logged 21,343 flight cycles and 53,979h of flight when the issue was identified.
Subsequent inspections revealed that four other 777-300s and one retired 777-200 had the same issue.”
https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/missing-777-rivet-heads-prompt-faa-call-for-inspections/143243.article
https://www.flyingmag.com/story/news/boeing-777-missing-rivets-faa/
https://simpleflying.com/faa-rivet-boeing-777-ad/
@George Tilton: There are many good reasons to search for MH370, but I’d say depressurization due to rivet failures is not one.
@Victor:
I’m not sure what independent researchers could accomplish if given greater access to classified information on UAP. Certainly there are brilliant minds working on complex physics/aerospace engineering projects at universities etc as separate stand-alone research that has high applicability to UAP, though without official government acknowledgement of it being associated with UAP, in effect a compartmentalization of knowledge. The degree to which UAP research is classified/protected shows its level of strategic importance.
Along these lines is an excellent article that discusses the above issue, particularly with regard to the development of aircraft radar: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-pilots-disclose-recent-ufos-encounters-new-radar-tech-key-in-detection
@Stuart: If not by independent review of the data, how would you suggest that we (members of the public) validate or invalidate encounters with these high speed, high maneuverability craft? Or should we simply trust government reports? I know these are not easy questions to answer.
@all,
From an AP news report on the missing Indonesian submarine:
“JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia’s navy is searching for a submarine that went missing north of the resort island of Bali with 53 people on board, the military said Wednesday.
Military chief Hadi Tjahjanto said the KRI Nanggala 402 was participating in a training exercise when it missed a scheduled reporting call.
The submarine is believed to have disappeared in waters about 60 miles (95 kilometers) north of Bali, he said.
Tjahjanto said the navy has deployed scores of ships to search the area, including a hydrographic survey ship, and has asked for help from Singapore and Australia, which have submarine rescue vessels.
The Defense Ministry said the submarine lost contact after being granted clearance to dive. It said a helicopter later spotted an oil slick near the dive’s starting position.
The submarine was carrying 49 crew members, its commander and three gunners, it said.
The navy said an electrical failure may have occurred during the dive, causing the submarine to lose control and become unable to undertake emergency procedures that would have allowed it to resurface. It said it believes the submarine sank to a depth of 600-700 meters (2,000-2,300 feet).
The German-built submarine, which has been in service in Indonesia since 1981, was rehearsing for a missile-firing exercise that was to take place on Thursday. Tjahjanto and other military leaders were to attend.”
This reminds me of ARA San Juan.
@Stuart,
First, those IR targeting pod videos don’t provide any information concerning the target speed. It appears to me the object is basically stationary. Possibly it is a balloon.
Second, the idea that we should believe that all contacts reported by a new synthetic aperture radar system are real aircraft is a stretch. False contacts can be caused by hardware glitches, software glitches, RFI, and atmospherics, just to name a few. In addition, the notion that new contacts suddenly appearing 10,000 feet away in altitude are the same, real object is far-fetched, in my opinion. The only reliable radar information that might support the notion of ultra-high accelerations is continuous, simultaneous tracking from multiple non-collocated radars.
@DrB:
In the first paragraph of your entry regarding targeting/IR pods, if you are referring to my description of an unknown object observed on UAV video feed, I think the explanation of a balloon can be ruled out. The unknown object displayed controlled movement via the rapid direction changes captured in the same field of view as the UAV, i.e. both were visible as the UAV maintained flight during the sensor sweep.
Regarding your second paragraph, there has been corroborating non-collocated radar tracking and simultaneous visual observation by ground personnel of an unknown UAP recorded by UAV operating at altitudes <10,000’ MSL location AF.
@DrB
Tragic news concerning the KRI Nanggala (402) but if the Indonesians engage OI to find the wreckage it might just be the event that brings them back to where they might consider relaunching an effort to find MH370.
@Stuart,
No, my first paragraph is related to the F/A-18 video in the article whose link you posted.
It’s impossible for anyone to assess the hearsay description of the purported UAV video you described. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is it?
Again, multiple simultaneous, independent radar tracks would be interesting if they showed ultra-high accelerations. To my knowledge, no data of this type have ever been made public, nor have I seen an authoritative public statement that even claims such data exist.
@ Mick Gilbert,
I have not yet seen a report that CTBTO has reported hearing an implosion from the sinking Indonesian submarine. If that happens, which I anticipate, it will be interesting to compare the implosion sound frequency with that measured for ARA San Juan. That comparison will imply their relative depths when the pressure hull collapsed.
You make a good point about OI possibly being asked to locate the Indonesian wreckage, and that potentially they might consider combining that venture with a new, targeted search for 9M-MRO. I believe OI has a real interest, but it’s hard to make a strong case for it when Malaysia is unmotivated to pay for it. It’s also possible for less capable technical means to locate the wreckage because of the smaller depth of 700 meters, so OI may not be needed.
@DrB:
Thanks for the clarification. Please know that F/A-18 pilot Dave Fravor (CDR, USN ret.) has stated that the UAP in question was maintaining a stationary position while exposed to 90kts plus wind therefore making the balloon explanation unlikely.
I wouldn’t refer to a description of UAV-filmed tactical ground activity with unknown aerial contact (UAP) as hearsay. With a USFOIA request and any luck, AATIP or it’s follow-on working group could release said video(s) in the near future pending review and release by the appropriate authority (said videos classified SECRET//REL FVEY and higher).
The “extraordinary evidence” you are demanding exists but is not yet available to the public. Hopefully our continuing advances in physics, aerospace engineering, material science, astronomy etc will give us a more complete understanding of space and the physical world. Think of what we can accomplish, given our current rate of progress, in 100, 1,000 or more earth-years, the constraints of linear travel may be, by then, in the distant past …..
@Stuart: Extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence deserve to be treated with healthy dose of skepticism–even claims from government officials. For instance, in December 2020, the Former Israeli Space Security Chief, Haim Eshed, claimed that the US Government has been dealing with aliens for years as part of the “Galactic Federation”. Not surprisingly, his claims coincided with a book release.
@Stuart,
You said: “Thanks for the clarification. Please know that F/A-18 pilot Dave Fravor (CDR, USN ret.) has stated that the UAP in question was maintaining a stationary position while exposed to 90kts plus wind therefore making the balloon explanation unlikely.”
A pilot’s impression is not credible evidence of a target being stationary. He does not know its distance accurately, nor its altitude, nor the wind at the object’s altitude. He is moving at a much higher speed than the object, and it is particularly difficult to estimate speed in this situation. How can one possibly determine if an object is “stationary” when the observer is moving at Mach 0.58 and the viewing geometry and the aircraft motion make the object appear to be moving with respect to the cloud deck below. I submit even a well-trained pilot cannot accurately make that determination.
There is insufficient information on the video display to determine the range and the approximate velocity of the object. We do know the relative look angles of the object with respect to the aircraft flight direction and we know the aircraft altitude. Those change with time because of the turn underway to the left. If we knew lat/lon/heading of the aircraft versus time, we could solve for the target position, altitude, and velocity. Unfortunately those data are not on the video, as far as I know. Perhaps they are recorded elsewhere in a FDR that could be time synchronized. I may be missing something, but I only find a relative time displayed on the video, not the absolute time. So, we don’t even know the time of day. That makes it more difficult to assess the target LWIR signature. The object is hotter than the background cloud deck. This implies the object is hotter than the surrounding air. It could be hotter because of an internal heat source, or it could be heated by sunlight, if it were daytime. I suspect it was daytime and the object was in full sunlight.
You also said: “I wouldn’t refer to a description of UAV-filmed tactical ground activity with unknown aerial contact (UAP) as hearsay.” The definition of hearsay is “information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate”. That is the case here. We don’t have the video, only a statement by one person of what he was told by a second person, who says he saw the video. That is clearly hearsay.
Have you all seen this? Don’t know if there’s anything to it.. Found it on twitter where “MH370” seems to be semi-trending lately for some reason.
“we have news of a further angle from an unexpected source. It’s possible that the aircraft’s path could show up in radio scatter detectable as anomalously long-distance contacts using the amateur radio WSPR protocol.
“WSPR is a low-power amateur radio mode designed to probe and record the radio propagation capabilities of the atmosphere. Transmit beacons and receiving stations run continuously, and all contacts however fleeting are recorded to an online database. This can be mined by researchers with an interest in the atmosphere, but in this case it might also provide clues to the missing airliner’s flightpath. By searching for anomalously long-distance WSPR contacts whose path crosses the expected position of MH370 it’s possible to spot moments when the aircraft formed a reflector for the radio waves. These contacts can then either confirm positions already estimated using other methods, or even provide further course points. It’s an impressive demonstration of the unexpected data that can lurk in a trove such as the WSPR logbook, and also that while messing about on the airwaves the marks we leave behind us can have more benefit than simply bragging rights over the DX we’ve worked.”
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/24/wspr-may-hold-the-key-to-mh370-final-position/
@Warren Platts: When @Rob first approached me with using WSPR to detect MH370, I encouraged him. It seemed like a worthwhile avenue to pursue that cost us nothing but @Rob’s time. @Rob seemed fairly grounded in what was and what was not possible.
Since then, I’ve seen an excitement about WSPR that I believe is premature. I haven’t seen any data that definitely shows that WSPR can detect an aircraft, and I also am skeptical that the underlying physics is valid. Long range propagation on HF bands is due to F-layer refraction at altitudes around 150 km, and I doubt a plane at 10 km over an ocean (which is an excellent reflector) will have much of an effect unless the plane is close to the receiver or transmitter. Also, propagation in the HF bands is subject to large changes in signal strength over short periods of time due to changes in the ionosphere, multipath interference, and even changes in polarization, so it becomes very, very difficult to discriminate natural effects from changes in signal strength due to a plane.
So for now, I’ll classify myself as a skeptic.
@DrB:
I have viewed “UAV-filmed tactical ground activity with unknown aerial contact (UAP)” directly on appropriate classified systems so I’m not reporting this as second-hand information.
I don’t know what your access to classified systems is/has been. Reports like the above are typically archived/available via keyword search on appropriate systems.
The final upcoming drawdown of US forces in AF may hasten the review and release of classified images and full-motion video involving UAP.
@all,
Debris from the Indonesian KRI Nanggala-402 submarine have been located on the sea surface and on the sea floor at 580 m depth. Reports say the wreckage is in three major pieces, so it imploded as it sank. Fifty three persons died in the accident. The wreckage has been imaged by a ROV:
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2021/04/25/Indonesia-submarine-crew-declared-dead-wreckage-found/5351619365286/
@DrB: Thank you for the update. What a tragedy it is.
@all,
I find it interesting that, so far, there are no public reports of implosion sounds of the Indonesian submarine KRI Nanggala-402 being heard on the CTBTO global listening network. The actual depth of the wreckage is 850 m (not 580 m, as I said above), and the implosion may have occurred at roughly 500-600 m depth. This is shallower than the SOFAR channel, so generally for an event like this to be heard at very long range, there must be a deeper, sloping bottom to reflect the downward pressure waves horizontally into the SOFAR channel. This may not have happened because of the relatively shallow water in the vicinity of the implosion. If it turns out that the implosion sounds are not easily found in the CTBTO data records, it is another example of how even loud sounds need an appropriate local geometry to efficiently couple into the SOFAR channel. MH370 may be another example. Having looked at the available CTBTO recordings for the MH370 event, Kiril Prostyakov and I concluded that there was no easily discernible event associated with the surface impact, compared to the existing noise and wave clutter. The notion that some aircraft fragments impacting the sea floor at very low speed would be detectable is not one that I think is credible. If pressurized cylinders survived the crash and imploded later after sinking to SOFAR depths, that might be detectable at nearby stations. I searched the acoustic records for an hour after 00:19 and found nothing.
@Dr B. I for one was never too sure the hydro acoustic noise from the San Juan was from its implosion. It might have been the intact hull impacting the bottom and the resulting gas bubble.
Indeed it seems quite possible that there was no implosion in either accident, that being the result of failure of the hull as a pressure vessel. At least as possible is that pipes, torpedo tubes, valves, hatches, hull weld seal failure and/or procedural error, would allow water ingress that grew to a flood.
An accelerating descent from within normal dive limits could then result in an impact sufficient to break the hull. While at 850 metres there would be a lesser volume of air escaping than in a descending implosion, on rising it would still make the extended noise trace of that from San Juan. That followed an initial short sharp sound.
The uncertain longitude of the CTBTO hydro acoustic noise analysis was refined by data from an Argentine seismic detection. However that station did not detect their depth charge explosion (102kg of TNT at 30 metres) in a trial that nevertheless was detected hydro acoustically by the CTBTO. That again suggests to me that this was an impact not an implosion.
I note also that the San Juan hydro acoustic detection, its characterisation and localisation apparently were not evident to the CTBTO until (according to Wikipedia) the well-informed Argentine ambassador to Austria suggested to its executive director they take a look; and even then that took some extremely complex analysis.
Two points: first, there might have been a seismic detection though below the CTBTO alert threshold. Second, hydro acoustic or seismic it is not automatic that the CTBTO would set to work looking for it.
So, about your, “..there are no public reports of implosion sounds of the Indonesian submarine KRI Nanggala-402 being heard on the CTBTO global listening network”, I suggest that that doesn’t mean necessarily that there was no detection.
@David,
Apparently you have not bothered to look at the photographs of the wreckage fields of these submarines. To suggest that the impact of a flooded, sinking pressure vessel with the sea floor would shred it into numerous pieces scattered about the sea floor is ludicrous. To suggest that bottom impact would create a louder and equally short impulse noise as a hull implosion, which is over in a fraction of a second, is equally ludicrous. The 2 inch thick hardened steel of the pressure hull was literally torn to pieces. That can’t possibly happen from any sort of collision. The only sources of energy sufficient to do that are the potential energy of the water pressure over the entire hull and possibly all torpedoes detonating simultaneously. As to the latter, the Russian Navy knows what can happen when you have a fire in the torpedo room which detonates warheads. It was called the Kursk.
@Dr B. Your judgement as to the wreckage likely from a flooded submarine’s impact with the sea floor is doubtless better informed than mine so I accept it despite your tenor. Indeed I note the Thresher for example, imploded.
But my main points, of the last two paragraphs, were that after the Indonesian accident, because there have been no, “public reports of implosion sounds”, does not mean necessarily that there was no seismic detection. There was with the San Juan.
There are several seismic stations nearby.
And because there has been no CTBTO statement that may not mean there was no hydro acoustic or seismic detection.
You may care to comment on these too, though let’s hope with your more usual patience and civility. Other than that, let’s leave it aside since this is somewhat a side issue.
@David
You said: “But my main points, of the last two paragraphs, were that after the Indonesian accident, because there have been no, “public reports of implosion sounds”, does not mean necessarily that there was no seismic detection.”
I agree. In the case of the ARA San Juan there were both detection and public announcement of the predicted implosion site. Indeed, the Argentine Navy detonated a charge at depth near the suspected implosion site of the ARA San Juan in a planned experiment so CTBTO could refine their estimated position.
For the KRI Nanggala-402 event, we simply don’t know yet if a corresponding sound was heard or not. Even if it were detected, it might not be publicized because the debris field location is already known. I’ll ask someone with access regarding detection of this event.
“torpedo room which detonates warheads”
I guess they were doing a torpedo exercise at the time. If you look at the bottom photo of this Guardian article, it seems suggestive of an internal explosion, maybe.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/25/missing-indonesian-submarine-found-broken-up-in-bali-sea
@David
KRI Nanggala was lost within the Bali Basin. To the south is land; to the west and north west, the shallow (<100m) Java Sea; to the north east and east Sulawesi & its islands. The wider, surrounding, bathymetry appears to be not conducive to hydroacoustic propagation through the deep sound channel.
In the case of ARA San Juan, multiple CTBTO hydrophone (& infrasound) detections permitted localisation of the submarine's implosion whereas only one seismic detection was recorded.
The geology of the Bali Basin and wider region may also be not conducive to seismic propagation from such a single point origin. Perhaps Ed can comment?
@Don, @DrB, @David, Re: “Perhaps Ed can comment”
No CTBTO hydrophones had a direct path to the Nanggala site. The only SOFAR path would have been to the east, completely blocked by Papua New Guinea to the nearest CTBTO hydrophones at Wake Island. That leaves only seismometers.
On Apr 22, I gathered available public seismometers within a 10 degree (1113 km) radius of the Last Known Position which was reported as “95 km N of Bali”. There are only 11 publicly available seismometers within that area. There were no obvious seismic detections worth reporting.
Indonesia has 144 active seismometers, but while the recordings are online at GEOFON and cataloged online, the data is Restricted. There are dozens of restricted seismometers that are closer to both the Nanggala implosion and the MH370 Java anomaly. I’ve not gotten a response to any of my requests for access to the Indonesian data.
The newest 4/25 info from a press conference moves the Nanggala location to -7,8155 114.8555 which is about 75 km closer to Bali than previously reported. I ran several plots with the new origin.
The nearest public seismometer GE.JAGI is on the south side of Java at 106 km, but it is has local noise. Quieter seismometers at GE.UGM (SE Java), GE.BBJI (S Java), and AU.XMI (Christmas Island) record an event at around 2022Z (4:22 local), which is about 3 minutes before the 0425 local time expected last communication for “authorization of firing torpedo tube 8”.
There is a later weak lineup of arrivals at 2102Z on the nearest three seismometers.
Without data from several nearer Indonesian seismometers, there was nothing conclusive to report. Access to the restricted Indonesian seismometer recordings could provide an accurate assessment of the implosion event timing, or possibly impact with the seafloor.
@All. I see from the ABC that the Indonesians are explaining what they mean by the KRI Nanggala sinking having natural causes, that being the local “internal wave”.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-30/indonesian-submarine-may-have-been-hit-by-internal-wave/100102816
Such a “wave” may have a distant cousin in the Dardanelles Strait where flow is in two streams, the less salty on top in one direction, the denser below. Recent research has shown there can in fact be three streams there occasionally.
The consequence is that a submerged submarine can encounter eddies (vertical as well as horizontal I presume). In the 1915 Gallipoli campaign several were lost to moored anti-surface ship mines when they ascended inadvertently or were driven ashore in the narrower parts and then shelled.
Implicit in the “internal wave” theory is that blowing ballast and adjusting hydroplanes, pitch and power to ascend would be insufficient or that control would have been lost. That might prove difficult to establish.
So far as I know there has been no definitive cause found for the San Juan loss.
Time for data and voice recorders, ejectable distress beacon and a peace time MEL equivalent? The underwater telephone was reported as not working.
@Victor. You might recall that Geoffrey Thomas of The West Australian newspaper reported in February that Ocean Infinity was willing to conduct a new search and awaited Malaysian approval. I posted a letter to the Deputy Prime Minister as Minister responsible for Transport and asked whether Australia had been consulted and if it had been, whether it had expressed a view; and if not, whether it had one.
I have received a response on behalf of the Minister answering the first question as no, the second therefore not arising.
The third remains unanswered. I imagine that is seen as a hypothetical without context so do not intend following that up.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cnjpslrcdub76n8/Letter%20re%20Australian%20view%20of%20future%20search.jpg?dl=0
@David: Thank you for sharing the letter. From my vantage point, I don’t see any party, public or private, expressing any genuine willingness to search in the near future.
@Jean-Luc Marchand: I offer the following short comments to your recent paper:
1. Your paper concludes that great circle paths over a fairly large range of final latitudes satisfy the BTO and BFO values. However, this conclusion was observed years before in this article from November 2017. If the plane did follow a great circle, that means there was a waypoint programmed in the FMS. The previous article also discusses some possibilities. In fact, the results from the article was presented to Ocean Infinity to justify a search along the arc as far north as 25S.
2. The article does not discuss the substantial body of work presented in UGIB (January 2021), which comprehensively investigated the effects of navigation mode, historical performance of 9M-MRO, altitude, fuel consumption, drift modeling, aerial search results, and weather. In UGIB, there was also a statistical methodology presented for separating systematic errors from stochastic errors. All these effects are important for discriminating acceptable paths.
3. You claim the due south path is “trivial” because the sensitivity of the BFO to track angle is zero for due south and due north paths. We’ve known for years that the BFO value only depends on the N-S component of groundspeed. However, that means that although the sensitivity of BFO to track angle is zero, the sensitivity to groundspeed is at its MAXIMUM value for north-south paths. To refer to the north-south path as “trivial” is misleading.
@Victor
Re: Captio paper
Agree that “trivial” (for 180 South path) is wrong word, unless we say “trivial” is synonymous with the apparent most obvious “initial solution” to the flight path problem. 180 South is MH370’s flight path Base case, I call it that.
Believe CAPTIO is saying, if we assign large but reasonable error bands to the BTO, BFO, and fuel data, then we cannot differentiate LNAV-mode flight end-points between 31 to 39 South, and if I extrapolate to include CMH,CMT flight modes, the end-point error band probably extends more like 27-39 South.
Believe those of us proposing specific southern end-point crash site solutions are assuming the flight data can be refined to give a more “precise” solution to the problem. Granted we have a range of specific end-point solutions proposed: the UIGA 34 South solution, the long and semi-popular 38-39 South solution, and I am trying to add a possible 30-32 South CMH solution to the mix.
Also we have active or passive pilot proposed solutions, whereas active pilot solutions may well include glide beyond the Arc7 already-searched area. Even if we can eventually provide a more precise solution to the Arc7 crossing point, any portion of the fight after Arc7, if any, has no data. In that case we would have to extrapolate beyond Arc7 with educated guesses.
@TBill
I think your post is a fair summary of the quandary we face.
Let me restate my general criticism that most proposed solutions focus on the path subsequent to the turn south and either fail to successfully integrate that portion of the path with the earlier radar track.
UGIB does, but requires too many assumptions for my taste.
After a fair amount of work last year and the critique on this blog, I settled on a waypoint navigation scenario to the turn south and then a track hold (rhumb line) thereafter. This does not require an active pilot after the turn south, but reduces the likelihood of a substantial glide at the end.
I am waiting to see how CAPTIO connects their recent study to the earlier timeframe.
@sid. There’s an excellent waypoint route that ends on 7th arc at 39.6S. VAMPI – MEKAR – SANOB – IGEBO – RUNUT – 45S80E. Assuming FL360 M0.84 from IGEBO or a little earlier this route gives you BTO errors <50 throughout. Using Dr B's fuel model v5.4 it is 4% (about 2 tonnes) short on fuel if you assume fuel exhaustion at 001730.
@Sid
CAPTIO’s current proposed path towards XMAS is consistent with UIGB 34 South path, in other words, it hits ARC2 at about the sane location (2-3 North) at 19:41
I would say, we do not really know what MH370 was up to between 18:25 and 19:41 except we know major maneuvers were in progress or completed by the 18:40 phone call, and we believe 19:41 may also have a resolution of a maneuver in progress, and 18:28 seems to be an OFFSET or if not, other unknown maneuver. Agree that it is necessary for completeness to make educated guesses for that period.
One idea CAPIO’s paper alludes to, in some ways, is smaller error bars towards the end of the flight. I would say, ask not what MH370 did up to Arc4, rather ask what did MH370 do between Arc4 and Arc7?
@Paul Smithson
You may recall that some time ago I ran that route, but continued at about 190.6 (rumb line)from RUNUT and obtained a result consistent with your report. My only significant concern was the fuel shortage. (My result, not using 45S80E as an additional arbitrary waypoint had a slightly better fuel result)
When I was trying to reconcile my studies with UGIB I realized that if one considered the fuel imbalance and that one engine shut down early, the fuel consumption diminished slightly. Did you consider that?
If one assumes that RUNUT is the last waypoint and a discontinuity occurs with no pilot action, there are two possibilities CMH and CTH that could be explored. Both would bring the track closer to the other studies and reduce the fuel consumption.
@TBill
I am starting to lose track of the various options….:-)
To be consistent with the UGIB conclusion, the CAPTIO track would have to be the same azimuth. Is it 180?
@Sid
No CAPTIO proposed path diverts towards the East using heading changes, descent and slow down to meet Arc timings. However, CAPTIO’s Xmas proposed path has approx similar amount of “loiter” as the UGIB 34S solution up to Arc2.
@sid. CMH and CTH from RUNUT both end within the zone already searched.
@TBill
The contrived arbitrary loiter is the problem. There is little difficulty in preceding the straight path with an arbitrary loiter. But, the scenario to get there is convoluted.
@Paul Smithson
The IG-like solutions and your RUNUT path do not require an arbitrary loiter. But if you assume a discontinuity at RUNUT the CMH and CTH solutions are relevant. Have you actually done these in detail? That the end points are in an area already searched is not a disqualification. Reaching the 7th arc at the correct time and with sufficient fuel is essential however.
@Sid’s Syndrome?
No, let’s call that the MH370 Logic Quandary.
We have active pilot doing many maneuvers, but somehow it is considered to be speculation to assume he stayed alive and made maneuvers after we lose the regular data flow. It equally speculation to assume no or few maneuvers.
@TBill
Well, not exactly.
It is less speculative to assume fewer unobserved maneuvers.
If we assume that the pilot did it, he is likely to be purposeful and not joyriding. So, maneuvers such as suggested by @Paul Smithson which are achieved through the waypoint navigation mode are reasonable. Arbitrary and unusual speed modalities are not. There are just too many arbitrary maneuvers that would approximately match up with the straight paths.
There are bounds on the loiter period.
Oddly, of the top of my head, I don’t think that the CAPITO study would be compatible with the 190T route.
One of my enduring issues with CAPITO (and the official studies) is the large bounds on the measured BFO error which admit too many potential solutions.
@Jean-Luc Marchand
Although I am possibly receptive to CAPTIO’s 4-piece aircraft break-up scenario, do you have an answer for why the ELT did not broadcast?
Personally I do not have too much problem suggesting pre-crash tampering, but I’d be curious re: CAPTIO’s explanation.
@370Location:
I am glad to see that you are back. I did not follow the Indonesian submarine accidents so much, but I do remember that when the Russian submarine (Kursk) crashed many years ago due to a torpedo explosion, seismometers in the UK recorded at least two clear signals. One came from the impact with the seabed, and a weaker signal came from the main torpedo explosion. I seem to remember that there was also an extremely weak signal before the bigger torpedo explosion. This small event was sufficient to figure out what had happened (H2O2 induced fire). It was all covered in great detail by BBC Horizon – an extremely sober program series from BBC.
Concerning MH370 related signals from Christmas Island, I would be greatful if you could find time to post the signal from AU.XMI corresponding to the same time as you did for AU.XMIS on March 8:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TTm3BenZ0n8rC4c2W2__x27Uamoq5JdW/view
I would like to see if there is a signal corresponding to the 12Hz AU.XMIS signal we briefly discussed in March.
@All:
Here is a link to BBC Horizon on Kursk:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/kursk.shtml
@Viking, all
A paper, published in EOS, described ‘Forensic Seismology and the Sinking of the Kursk‘.
Sources of the seismic detections (explosions, etc) are explored.
Don’t know if this has been posted regarding MH370 yet. Apologies if so. But very interesting..https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mh370-pilot-made-many-turns-speed-changes-new-report-reveals/
@Viking, @Don, @All:
Thanks for the links on the Kursk. The intensity of the Java Anomaly is on the order of the precursor Kursk explosion, as it only appears on nearby seismometers. Further Nanggala analysis might not be useful as a reference without access to the the nearer Indonesian seismometers.
@Viking, family is still top priority, but I was able to run that XMI plot. This is the same timeframe as the nearby XMIS plot:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WLi6LJFGgstfzTXnlDI2eAn__TZr_277/view
I think I mentioned that the Christmas Island airport seismometer is near a hangar, and there are lots of periodic noise sources, possibly compressors and pumps. It may be helpful to see an autocorrelation plot, as the same source should make similar sounds over time:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gdZDDYtBvwzqPJ7HoKC09eHtgVDxtBkX/view
@WSPR:
I added a comment on the Hackaday site that links back to our comments:
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/24/wspr-may-hold-the-key-to-mh370-final-position/#comment-6343640
@Bobc: To put it politely, there is a large amount of skepticism that WSPR can be used in the way proposed to find MH370. For instance, see @370Location’s comment preceding this one.
@370Location: There is a claim that MH370 might have been detected by WSPR based on an intersection of anomalous paths at (-34.4,93.2). However, there is a WSPR station, WB8ELK, at the antipode, i.e., (34.4,-86.8). That intersection of long paths in the SIO could be simply the mirror image of the paths starting at WB8ELK near Huntsville, Alabama, USA, if WB8ELK was a station for those intersecting paths.
Using the file of WSPR contacts that Mike Exner assembled, the coordinates of WB8ELK are (34.395833,-86.791667), and the antipode is (-34.395833,93.208333). (The actual location of WB8ELK is offset from this, but to be consistent with the WSPR analysis, I am using the WSPR coordinates.) If the claimed WSPR detection of MH370 in the SIO is very close to this position, likely WB8ELK contacts were used in this incorrect analysis.
A proponent of WSPR detection of MH370 asked: How do you explain WSPR links meeting at the crash site of MH370 at 34.40°S 93.21°E?
Using the WSPR coordinates convention, the antipode location of WB8ELK is precisely 34.40°S, 93.21°E to two decimal places. If the DX contacts that were used to determine the MH370 crash site were transmissions from WB8ELK, the crossing of great circle paths at this location can be exactly explained. There were 98 reports of transmissions from WB8ELK between 00:00 and 00:30 UTC on March 8, 2014, and 10 at 00:20 UTC. As you recall, WB8ELK is in Northern Alabama. The reporting stations were in the US, Canada, and Western Europe.
There is a ham in Australia that has a youtube channel called Ham Radio DX. He evaluates the possibility of using WSPR data to locate MH370 in a video. (Spoiler alert: He’s not kind.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KefDzzDAeew
@Victor:
Nice youtube link. I agree with every single word he is saying.
@370Location
Many thanks for the additional data. The noise level is high (as expected) but it is still useful. I will come back with more details soon.
@Victor et. al.
I do not understand how people are treated on the various blogs and Youtube with regard to MH370.
Hayden, VK7HH, obviously never looked at http://www.hamsci.org 2021 convention and never read the iPoster “Geocaching in the Ionosphere”. In addition obviously he never monitored live and raw WSPR signals before publishing videos on Youtube.
By chance I have monitored his own WSPR signals from Tasmania being scattered by aircraft in Oceania and being received live by KiwiSDR ZL1PWM in Newzealand at HF in early 2021. That makes at least 2.000 km distance. I do have screen shots of his own raw WSPR signals being deformed by interference in time and frequency domain due to aircraft flying around Australia. You will not see that in the database (www.wsprnet.org) as there are only secondary data in the database.
We can discuss the wording such as laser beams,trip lines etc. by RG but I do not understand how people who thrive in the same direction fundamentally treat each other so badly, alsmost like in politics or in Kindergarden.
Okay, “I admitt having bad dreams at night detecting so many aircraft” in Antarctica (military and others)and QFA114 at IG’s LEP in November 2020 during the last 6 months.
Research can be fun and hard work, sometimes it is a pain in science and industry but even with volunteers I absolutely have no idea why people with a good education (and manners?) treat each other so badly!
Everything VK7HH is requesting at the end of his video has been accomplished. He just did not do his homework. Have a nice weekend!
How to win friends and influence people:
Tell Ocean Infinity to spend millions more to search again because you calculated the crash site is exactly where they searched last time and missed it.
Tell Malaysia to sign a contract to restart the search because you calculated exactly where the crash site is based on their suicidal mass murderer pilot plugging in a bearing of 180°S.
@Rob: I believe Hayden was reacting to the many news reports that presented WSPR detection of MH370 without the appropriate level of caution. As he said, first, you have to prove WSPR detection of aircraft works, then you apply it to MH370. Do you really believe that at this time WSPR detection of aircraft is proven? I would consider it at best a work-in-progress.
Do you really believe MH370 was detected in the SIO by WSPR signal anomalies in the long-path direction?
Furthermore, there was a claim that MH370 could be detected near the crash point as localized by the intersection of 7 WSPR paths, as shown in this figure. First, even if WSPR signal anomalies occurred in the long path direction, it is impossible that WSPR would provide sufficient accuracy for 7 paths to exactly intersect. But worse, those paths match 7 reports of transmission from WB8ELK in Alabama, US, as reported by stations in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. It turns out the intersection was at the exact antipode of WB8ELK, which explains why the 7 paths intersected precisely.
If you believe that Hayden, VK7HH, misrepresented your work, I suggest you contact him. His contact information is on QRZ.com. I think there would be a useful and friendly exchange of information among two hams that we can all learn from. I would be happy to present that exchange of information here on the blog, where there could be a respectful discussion.
@Anakin: We can suggest, but we can’t command those activities to occur.
My suggestion would be to first perform a virtual search near the LEP to review the existing data, determine its quality, and locate where gaps occur. As it stands, we are only guessing based on the challenging terrain reported by the bathymetric survey.
“There is a recent paper by Mike Eichorn on MH370 drift modeling available HERE.
This paper shows the effect of assuming different leeway coefficients for MH370 debris. The shift in the predicted Point of Impact (POI) with wind-driven drift is expected, and it has been discussed in previous studies. One result of the paper is to show that, if the leeway coefficient were assumed to be between 0.0% and 0.4%, instead of the 1.2% used by CSIRO (Griffin et al), the predicted crash location would be shifted to 0.2N 70.1E.
Using an assumed leeway coefficient of 1.2%, Eichorn predicts two potential POI. One POI along the 7th Arc is predicted to be circa 32S. Thus, one of his results is slightly north of other similar predictions. Eichorn also predicts a second POI circa 20.5S 107.6E away from the 7th Arc.
One flaw in Eichorn’s analysis is the assumption that all the 32 debris reports he used were “very probably from MH370”. This ignores the official evaluations of the debris reports, which conclude that at least 8 of these were not identifiable. Thus, only a subset of the debris reports should have been used, those for which the item was identifiable and likely to be from 9M-MRO.
I would also point out that there are no discrepancies between the debris reports of “Point of Discovery” (POD) and “Time of Discovery” (TOD) of the identifiable and likely-from-MH370 items and the CSIRO predictions using 1.2% leeway with POIs on the 7th Arc. Thus, in my opinion, the lack of any discrepancy between a 7th Arc POI and the debris reports makes it unnecessary to invoke a different leeway coefficient to achieve consistency, unless one is simply trying to assess the likelihood of a POI being far from the 7th Arc. Said a different way, there is a POI on the 7th Arc from which the CSIRO predictions statistically match the discovery reports of identifiable MH370 debris.
A minor point is that Eichorn lists as a “pro” for his results, including the possibility of a POI near the Maldives, that “Kudahuvadhoo witnesses saw a large low-flying jet plane on the morning of 2014-03-08”. The possibility this aircraft was 9M-MRO has previously been investigated and is very unlikely.
Victor Iannello and I are continuing our work on determining the most likely POI using the CSIRO “forward-in-time” drift predictions using the 1.2% leeway coefficient (except for the Flaperon). This work has taken about 14 months and is nearing a conclusion. It differs from previous work in several ways. Indeed, we have gone through an evolution of several different methods as we identified various shortcomings; this has been a major factor in the considerable investment we have made in effort and in time on this project.
Our final method is unique in that it predicts a true probability of the POI being at various latitudes near the 7th Arc, using the reliable reports of identifiable MH370 debris. A “joint” probability density function (PDF) is computed, and typically the selectivity in POI latitude is quite sharp when using numerous debris, allowing the most-likely POI latitude to be determined with a precision of roughly ½ degree. The statistical error in each PDF value is also computed. It depends primarily on the numbers of trials employed in the calculations. The overall accuracy of the POI latitude prediction is estimated to be +/- 1 degree.
To validate our method of “POI Retrieval”, which is our method of doing a “backward-in-time” prediction, we have been conducting two tests. The first set of validation tests was to retrieve the POI from “artificial” sets of assumed arriving dates (i.e., the TOD), while using the actual finding locations (i.e., the POD). We generated the sets of “artificial” TOD dates by randomly selecting dates of closest approach for CSIRO trials originating from an assumed POI latitude. This was done for a number of assumed POI latitudes. This “non-blind” validation test served two purposes. First, it allowed us to assess the POI retrieval error. Second, it allowed us to determine an effective figure of merit (FOM) for optimizing the selectivity in the PDF for a single debris. That is, one must filter the CSIRO trial predictions in space and time to determine the fraction which are consistent with the POD/TOD of a debris report. It is apparent from the distance errors and time errors of the trials that the optimum “window” settings in space and time depend on both the POI and the POD, as well as on the TOD (to a lesser extent). This means that the distance and time windows for matching a debris report with optimum crash-latitude selectivity are generally different for each debris report. Using fixed windows will lead to diminished selectivity and potentially to a POI latitude bias. Thus, a unique feature of our method is the optimization of the distance and time windows for a given debris report, for a Region of Interest” (ROI) in crash latitude. Our POI retrieval method is therefore iterative. That is, we first use fixed windows to find the general region of highest probability. That latitude window is now set as the ROI for distance/time window optimization. Then, in a second iteration, we optimize the FOM (which has no explicit dependence on latitude) for all crash latitudes in a 7-degree-wide ROI. Now we find the optimized time and distance windows, and we calculate the PDF for that debris. This process is repeated for all debris, and the Joint PDF is calculated as the product of the individual single-debris PDFs. No linear averaging of single-debris PDFs is appropriate, because we want to know the probability that all of them occurred, so a product of probabilities must be used, not a linear sum. Our end result is the conditional probability that the POI occurred in a given crash-latitude bin near the 7th Arc, given that each debris was found at its POD and at its time TOD. The relative values of adjacent crash-latitude bins in the Joint PDF may then be used to (crudely) interpolate a POI latitude which is between the centers of adjacent bins.
A second set of “blind” validation tests is also now underway. In this test sequence, I am attempting to accurately retrieve the assumed POI for several test cases with no knowledge of the assumed POI (i.e., like the MH370 data set). Only if this second test is successfully passed will we have confidence that our POI retrieval method is accurate. If so, then we will publish our MH370 POI prediction made using the same validated method, along with our error analysis.
Of course, our predictions are only as good as the CSIRO drift model, since that is our starting point. However, to date there are only two debris reports which appear inconsistent with CSIRO predictions for undrogued drifters. One is the flaperon, and CSIRO measured and used its specific drift parameters. The other item is the towelette packet, which arrived well before the predictions. Its light weight and high buoyancy make it likely it would skip across the sea surface in high winds, so drifting faster than mostly-submerged objects like undrogued drifters is to be expected. We don’t use the towelette packet in our analysis because there is no model for its drift parameters, and it might not have come from MH370 (although I am of the opinion it could have). In summary, we don’t see any obvious discrepancies between the CSIRO drift predictions and the MH370 drift reports, so their assumption of a POI near the 7th Arc appears to be valid. For any other scenario to be true, two changes are required to maintain consistency with the debris reports: (1) the POI must be well away from the 7th Arc, and virtually all the recovered debris must drift differently from undrogued drifters. In addition, for a POI near the Maldives, an explanation must also be generated to explain why debris were not found in Somalia and the Sunda Strait.
@Rob,
To prove that WSPR is a potentially useful tool for localizing Flight MH370 in the SIO, it is necessary, in my opinion, first to do the following:
1. Demonstrate that an unknown aircraft flight path in the SIO may be detected and localized using circa March 2014 WSPR data, with no foreknowledge of the aircraft track. That is, find an aircraft flight path (i.e., a sequence of relatively nearby locations) without assuming any specific location, only a general area.
2. Demonstrate that this aircraft flight path is consistent with a known aircraft track, by comparison with an ADS-B database.
Note that this order is the opposite of what some people have done, which is assuming a location of a known aircraft track and then looking for anomalies that might indicate an aircraft detection. The anomalies due to an aircraft may or may not occur in a reliable fashion. To be a reliable method, one must be able to find an unknown aircraft location using the anomalies, not find the anomalies using a known aircraft track.
Furthermore, one needs to be able to resolve the location differences of other aircraft. Circa 1830 UTC, for example, there were other known aircraft in the vicinity of MH370, such as UAE343. Why haven’t these other aircraft been detected along with MH370 if the path intersection method works? Can one tell them apart?
I, for one, don’t see why anyone makes the assumption that the method could only work if the aircraft were located exactly on a great circle path between Tx and Rx. An aircraft will scatter signal even when it is off the great circle, so constructive/destructive interference could occur, in principle, due to the multiple paths. The multipath signal is quite complex at the Rx, because the propagation delay, signal strength, polarization, and frequency of the aircraft-scattered signal will vary compared to the main signal path. Their vector sum at the Rx will be just about impossible to model accurately. However, interference caused by the alternate path scattered off the aircraft might be detectable, even if the aircraft is off the great circle track. A relatively weak secondary path signal might interfere with the primary path signal in a detectable way.
Fortunately, for the night in question and at other nearby dates there are known flights in the SIO that can be used for testing the method. It might turn out that an aircraft near, but not exactly on, a great circle path is sometimes detectable, so the great circle becomes a band with a significant width, perhaps tens of miles. The width of the band will depend on the carrier frequency and on its modulation. The farther off track one gets, the less coherence there will be in the secondary signal from the aircraft compared to the principal path.
I’ll believe the WSPR method works for aircraft detection only when someone demonstrates accurately retrieving aircraft tracks without using any specific aircraft location data in the process. Then one must show that it works in the SIO using March 2014 WSPR data for several known flights other than MH370. Finally, one must find the proposed MH370 SIO track and show that it is not in the ABS-B database of other flights at any time. To my knowledge, none of these three steps have been accomplished.
@DrB
Thank you for the update.
Good to know you are still on the ball and haven’t drifted off somewhere.
@all,
Regarding the possibility of multipath producing detectable anomalies in WSPR message records, consider a primary signal which is channeled by alternating reflections between the ionosphere and the Earth’s surface ands generally following a great circle track. Radio frequencies below 10 MHz are reflected from the E-Layer in the ionosphere at roughly 120 km altitude, and higher frequencies are reflected by the F-Layer at roughly 250 km altitude. Next, add a much weaker secondary-path signal, which has one additional scatter (reflection and/or diffraction) by an aircraft. A relevant question is, how weak could this secondary signal be to produce a detectable change in received signal level? The answer is that a secondary signal path which has only 1.5% of the power of the primary signal can produce, by constructive and destructive interference (depending on the relative phase difference), changes in received signal power of +/- 1 dB. If this type of interference occurs, one can see that even a much weaker secondary-path signal could modulate the total received power in a potentially detectable manner. The secondary-path signal will generally be much stronger if the aircraft is near either the transmitter or receiver. These cases are the easiest to detect. When the aircraft is near the midpoint of the propagation path, the secondary signal strength will be at a minimum which is very low by comparison.
One can estimate the relative signal strength for an aircraft near the midpoint. Assume the cross-sectional area is 200 square meters, and also assume the scatter from the aircraft is isotropic (equal in all directions). Next, for the MH370 case, assume the aircraft is 4,000 km from both transmitter and receiver. In the best case, the relative power of the secondary, aircraft-scattered signal will be on the order of 0.003% of the direct-path signal. This is too low to produce a detectable signal power effect. For a relative power of 1.5%, the aircraft would need to be only 7.5 km from the transmitter or receiver. So, for worst-case isotropic scattering by the aircraft, the aircraft needs to be directly over the transmitter to be detectable at 1 dB. The actual scattered signal will be higher than isotropic in certain directions, and this will, for certain geometries, extend the range over which an aircraft may be detected. Still, reliable detection at long ranges likely requires a specular reflection off a relatively flat surface, such as the upper or lower wing surfaces.
Depending on the primary and secondary signal levels, in this idealized case of the two signals being identical except in amplitude and phase, the presence of the secondary signal could increase the received power or decrease the received power. So, the anomaly could either be more detections or fewer detections, depending on the phase shift (time delay) between the two paths. If the time delay of the secondary signal were zero, then the two signals would add, producing maximum received power. If the time delay were an odd multiple of 50 ns, at 10 MHz the received signal power would be at a minimum. Since the pathlength difference is likely to be much larger than 50 ns, either constructive or destructive interference could occur, and it can even be changing rapidly during one message. So, if aircraft-caused anomalies occur in received power, they could be in either direction and could change rapidly during a message. A periodic modulation of the received power during the received message might be a detectable aircraft anomaly, especially for aircraft crossing the direct path at a right angle. I would guess this amplitude information was not generally recorded in 2014, but it might be done now.
The greater the lateral displacement of the aircraft is from the primary signal path, the greater will be the time delay of the secondary path signal. In general, this additional time delay may not be too impactful for small lateral shifts of the aircraft off the direct signal path, except in modulating the received power.
In practice, the two received signals generally differ in every way possible, so it may be that certain special cases are more likely to be detectable. First, consider the Doppler shift. Now the secondary signal may be frequency-shifted relative to the primary signal, being at higher or lower frequency depending on the angle between the direction of flight of the aircraft and the path from the transmitter to the aircraft. Flight paths crossing normal to the transmitter path won’t produce a Doppler shift, and flight paths parallel to the transmitter path will produce the maximum frequency shift. Since the information is embedded in the transmitted signal by frequency-shift keying, the Doppler shift might have a slight effect on the average measured frequency.
The WSPR modulation scheme is to transmit four different frequencies (about 1.45 Hz apart), with the frequency being changed every 683 ms. This is done 162 times over a 110.6 second message, beginning one second after every even minute. Fifty bits are transmitted, comprising the call sign, location code, and transmitter power. Additional information such as received power and received frequency, may be recorded.
Since the entire bandwidth of the transmitted signal is less than 6 Hz, one can see that, if only the aircraft signal were received, in general the frequency would be shifted completely out of the expected band by its Doppler shift. This would be a huge anomaly, but in practice this probably would not be recorded even if it did occur (because of the weak signal strength and the highly variable received frequency). So, I can make an educated guess that, in general, if WSPR anomalies are recorded due to aircraft, the received signal is likely to be a sum of the “direct” signal path and the aircraft-scattered signal field strength, not just the aircraft-scattered signal.
The duration of each transmitted frequency is 683 ms. In that time light travels about five times around the circumference of the Earth. Thus, we can see that the start/stop times for each of the constant-frequency transmissions, lasting 683 ms each, are only trivially affected by the extra path length of the secondary aircraft propagation path, even if the aircraft is laterally off the direct path by tens of miles. Furthermore, if the secondary aircraft path signal is a small fraction of the power of the direct path, the presence of the aircraft-scattered signal will have a very small effect on the observed frequency. In fact, the frequency anomaly may be comparable to the frequency drift/inaccuracy caused by the oscillators in both transmitter and receiver. Even when both are slaved to a GPS transmitted carrier frequency, I would think it is difficult to achieve 1 Hz stability. So, amplitude noise, frequency drift, and frequency jitter in the receiver all produce observable frequency errors, and these may be comparable to the frequency error induced by the secondary aircraft signal. Thus, I would predict that the frequency anomalies will be difficult to detect and would require, at a minimum, both transmitter and receiver to be slaved to a common reference oscillator signal. I suspect this was an uncommon practice in 2014.
The secondary aircraft signal may have a slightly different polarization angle than the direct path signal. In general, the impact is the same as having a different signal strength, as discussed above. It might be possible to detect the polarization angle shift at the receiver when an aircraft produces a secondary path, but I don’t think any of the WSPR receivers are polarimeters. They probably use a single polarization, so this type of anomaly is unlikely to be helpful in detecting MH370.
During the transmission of one WSPR message, which lasts 110.6 seconds, a commercial aircraft might travel 15 NM. This is another reason not to assume the aircraft must lie exactly along the direct-signal path if an anomaly is detected. It could be within a band which is tens of miles wide. This has three implications. First, the localization accuracy is unlikely to be better than several tens of miles. Second, it may be difficult or impossible to resolve two aircraft which are less than several tens of miles apart. Third, there is a higher probability of multiple intersections occurring within the bands of each great-circle propagation path.
To summarize, I would predict, from first principles, that the received signal power is the easiest anomaly to be detected by WSPR. Frequency shift and polarization are more difficult anomalies to detect. Finally, aircraft detection rapidly grows more difficult with aircraft range from the transmitter and receiver, with the relative received power decreasing at least as fast as the aircraft range increases.
Putting aside the extraordinary claim of using two-minute averaged WSPR SNR and frequency drift data for “Global Detection and Tracking any Aircraft Anywhere Anytime”, I think a number of us would be willing to review the work of @Rob, and in particular the I-Q data and waterfall plots of short path signals that intersect plane paths in the SIO for which we have ADS-B data, to determine if there is a measurable interaction with the plane. I thought that was @Rob’s general direction.
I’ll add that collectively, contributors here have a substantial amount of experience with HF propagation as active or formerly active hams, in addition to professional experience with RF hardware and software.
@Victor Iannello
@DrB
Gents, a question from the cheap seats if I may. For something to be “detected” by WSPR it has to cross or come close to the great circle path between the transmitting station and the receiving station, doesn’t it?
I am trying to understand how Rob was able to detect helicopter ops out of Davis Station using a transmitter in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica and a receiver in New Zealand – the great circle path connecting the two goes nowhere near where the helicopter was flying. Same same for his reported detection of Qantas’s Antarctic sight seeing flight out of Perth (QF2904) using a transmitter in Perth and a receiver in Osaka.
@Mick Gilbert: I haven’t plotted the points, but if they are not on a great circle, he might be considering scattering in directions other than forward. Of course, that makes the localization of the target even more difficult.
@Rob?
@Victor Iannello
Thank you for that reply Victor.
I’m also waiting on Dr Rob’s response in a different forum. From my limited dissection of his paper, and as an non-scientist, I’ve got to say that this whole WSPR endeavour strikes me as homoeopathy on the electromagnetic spectrum (I have an alternate way of describing it that wouldn’t be appropriate for polite company).
@Mick Gilbert: Well, I remain skeptical. On the face of it, the forward scattered signal is too weak to detect the plane with low power HF and at long distances. I think @Rob was trying to prove or disprove it empirically, which is fine. Unfortunately, the WSPR database doesn’t have sufficient information to understand what is going on (or not going on). Collecting I-Q data and looking at waterfalls to detect aircraft scattering is required, but the WSPR database only includes S/N and frequency shift data. I support trying to understand the science before proclaiming (even hypothetically) that the MH370 path can be deduced from the available WSPR data.
@Victor Iannello
Thanks Victor. Another question if I may; the fact that many of the transmitting and receiving stations used in the WSPR analysis are themselves located quite close to major airports would impact the analysis, wouldn’t it?
For example, in Rob’s paper his stated detection of helicopters at Davis Station was via ZL2005SWL in New Zealand based on signals received from DP0GVN in Antarctica.
ZL2005SWL, near Nelson at the north of the South Island, sits adjacent to one of the busiest domestic air routes in New Zealand; Auckland – Christchurch. At the time of the Davis Station helo ops there were numerous commercial aircraft passing adjacent to or over ZL2005SWL. I’m wondering how is it possible to prove that the “detection” related to the Davis Station helos and not say a helo flying in Milford Sound in New Zealand or Air New Zealand flight 571 from Auckland to Christchurch passing ZL2005SWL?
Essentially the same problem presents itself with the two stations used in the reported “detection” of Qantas’s Antarctic sight seeing flight out of Perth, QF2904; VK6CQ in the Perth suburb of Willetton and JH3APN in Higashiosaka, Osaka. They are both close to major airports. In fact for an attempt at studying the detection of aircraft using WSPR the use of VK6CQ strikes me as a particularly poor choice. Perth has two airports – the main commercial domestic/international airport and Jandakot general aviation airport – and VK6CQ sits between the two, only a few kilometres from Jandakot and essentially on the extended centre line of the main runway at Perth International.
Surely the influence of aircraft that are close to the station is going to be an issue in any proper analysis?
@Mick Gilbert: I agree with your concerns, and have many other ones.
@all,
Malaysia has paid compensation to the families of two MH370 passengers:
https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2021/05/13/govt-to-pay-rm1-3mil-to-family-of-two-mh370-victims/?fbclid=IwAR3p3RBf5ftFhc4lLNhO4tTuHTj8CoqzPB9hVTZXXkmPJVql85fF4BrwGA0
@DrB: If I am interpreting the article correctly, it looks like the children and parents of two passengers will get around US$300K.
SJ Flight 182. Wire connection problem possibly related:
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-requiring-inspections-wire-failure-boeing-737-classic-planes-2021-05-14/
A couple of days ago, an amazing accident occurred as a Cirrus SR22 and a Metroliner twin-engine turboprop were landing on parallel runways at Centennial Airport, about 11 NM to the southeast of Denver, Colorado.
As the Metroliner was on final for runway 17L, the SR22 overshot the turn from right base to final for runway 17R, and collided with the Metroliner, which only had a pilot onboard. The Metroliner declared an emergency, and landed without incident, although the damage to the passenger cabin was extensive. Meanwhile, the SR22 deployed the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) from a height of around 500′ AGL, and safely drifted down to a park.
An accident that could have claimed the lives of many resulted in no loss of life.
More details can be found here.
Re: Cirrus SR22 and a Metroliner twin-engine
I used to fly out of Centennial Airport. Had a C172 hangered there. It is a much busier controlled airport now with lots of jet traffic. Looking at the fuselage damage, it is amazing the Metroliner remained controllable.
The CAPS system has saved a number of lives. We have the same type of airframe parachute system in our Phoenix Motor Glider. In this case, the SR22 pilot was lucky that he survived the midair impact, there was no fire, and the chute deployed.
Eleven years ago, there was another midair involving an Cirrus (SR20) here in Boulder. That one did not turn out so good. Three dead. The SR20 flew straight into the right side of a Pawnee Towplane with an S2-32 in tow. The towpilot was killed instantly. The Cirrus CAPS parachute deployed, but the airframe came down on fire. Sally and I happened to be near the POI and I went to the scene, but there was nothing that could be done for the 2 people in the Cirrus. It looked like they jumped from the plane to escape the fire and died on impact. The amazing part of this tragic tale is that the glider on tow, only 200 feet behind the tug, released and landed safely back at KBDU with 3 people on board the S2-32. I talked to the glider pilot after the incident. He said he saw the SR20 about 1 second before impact, pulled the release and climbed to the right, missing most (but not all) of the debris. Read more here: https://bayareane.ws/3uUUke6
and here: https://on.today.com/3w5aD8f
A new claim that WSPR can be used to detect UFOs:
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/ufo-sightings-confirmed-radio-techniques-24109688
Sure…makes perfect sense…(NOT!)
For those still wondering if historical WSPR data can be used to detect or track aircraft (any aircraft), I want to pass on a quote from Joe Taylor (K1JT). In case you missed it, Joe was the principal inventor of the WSPR protocol and several versions of the SDR code used to implement it. When I first contacted Joe, he was not aware of the controversy surrounding the attempted use of WSPR data to find MH370. I won’t repeat what he said privately about the idea, but here is a quote he agreed to provide on the subject:
“I do not believe that historical data from the WSPR network can provide any information useful for aircraft tracking.”
— Joe Taylor, K1JT
You can read about Joe Taylor’s credentials here: https://bit.ly/2RoqOP5
@Victor Iannello
A new claim that WSPR can be used to detect UFOs
UFOs, missing pets, lost opportunities – the applications are going to be endless. WSPR is going to render all other detection and tracking systems obsolete. And no investment is required, the hardware’s all there.
Meanwhile, in La-La Land, apparently guessing now counts as a legitimate baseline for validation. And “rigorous” validation to boot. https://www.airlineratings.com/news/new-mh370-breakthrough-tracking-technology-passes-rigorous-valiadtion-test/
Here in the cheap seats I had always thought that the hard and soft sciences took a similar approach to the scientific process:
Observation
Hypothesis
Experiment/data collection
Analysis
Report
Headline (maybe)
It seems here we’re witnessing
Observation
Hypothesis
Report
Headline
Experiment/data collection
Report
Headline
Analysis
Report
Headline
The fact that the Nobel laureate who invented it thinks it’s nonsense tells you everything you need to know. It is astounding that this bunkum is getting any traction anywhere.
It is as close to voodoo as you’re likely to get without having to eviscerate a chicken.
I certainly miss Dennis at times like this.
@ALSM: Thank you, Mike. That should remove any lingering doubt whether WSPR historical data can be used for tracking MH370. It can’t, as many of us have been saying.
@Mick Gilbert said: I certainly miss Dennis at times like this.
Dennis didn’t think it would work.
@Victor Iannello
Dennis didn’t think it would work.
Yes, and I’m sure that he would have had some entertainingly colourful turns of phrase to address the involved quackery.
@Mick Gilbert: The physics say that detection of aircraft scatter at long distances, at HF, and at low power is very unlikely. That said, data proving otherwise would be helpful.
It’s possible to test this theory using real-time data. ADS-B data is provided by FlightRadar24 and other tracking services. Simply demonstrate that WSPRnet data can be used to reliable detect planes that cross propagation paths, and there are no detections when planes do not cross propagation paths. The planes do not need to be flying over the SIO. As a first step, any region would be acceptable.
@Victor Iannello
Yes, agreed, that would appear to be the proper approach to demonstrating the bona fides of applying WSPR to the problem. You’ve got to wonder why that quite simple and logical approach has been eschewed.
KRI Nanggala 402. Pressure hull may be buried in a crater.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/lost-submarine-fragments-found-on-bottom-of-ocean-but-no-bodies-20210518-p57szv.html
Can’t help but notice the Cartoonographer is again in full flight. Doesn’t seem to matter that his plot of the 7th arc is completely misunderstood, or that Pythagoras is completely mis-applied, negating all his geometrical constructs.
@Brian Anderson:
Yeah. It seems Victor Vescovo and his ship, Pressure Drop, is currently exploring the Wallaby-Zenith Fracture Zone as part of his scientific expedition to the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. This just happens to coincide with the Cartoonographer’s latest geometrical construct. Pure coincidence of course.
@David,
SMH describes that “the recovery team is still trying to remove the bow and stern sections [but] it has given up on pulling out the 20-tonne bridge as it was deemed too heavy.”
I presume the reporter means ‘sail’ when ‘bridge’ is stated.
If 20 tonnes is too heavy for the vessels involved at present, they’re not likely to lift anything substantial.
@Don Thompson. Yes I would have thought that is what they meant.
However I hazard that it could well retain substantial connections to the hull and/or casings, even after general severance.
Hard to get something down there powerful enough to separate it? 20 tons as its submerged deadweight becomes that plus tie breaking force?
@David
The Chinese vessel operating the submersibles, Tan Suo Er Hao, is not equipped to lift anything substantial. I expect they’re in survey phase, assessing how salvage might be attempted. 100s of tonnes lying at nearly 900m depth will require some creative thinking, further complicated if the wreck has buried itself in the bottom.
@DonThompson. Yes, depending on water clarity surely they will try to ascertain the cause without raising but supposing that proves impossible there will be the aim to get the pressure hull, which presumably is in one piece, up – and there may be that expectation from next-of-kin anyway.
If the Indonesians are talking to others about the lift as reported it would seem that the Chinese will not be making sufficient capability available. Do you know what the lift capability of Yongxing Dao-863, purportedly a salvage vessel is and what form it takes?
I have seen air filled ‘parachutes’ used on small wreckage (a few tons), air expansion ‘overflowing’ the parachutes as they ascend. The trick is not to partially fill many parachutes. The rate of ascent then can get out of control, the parachutes deflating on breaching at the surface. However filling one at a time, if distributed you have a stability issue as the load breaks free from the bottom.
That approach would require air delivery down there at over 1200 psi and means of parachute attachment. A doubtful prospect but if successful, tow the lot to shallow water, re-lower and inspect/section there.
As you will know the Hughes Glomar Explorer was specially built to lift K-129 from 16000ft.
I suspect though that if any nation had such a capability now it would not be disclosed by use in this recovery.
@David,
I doubt that any of the vessels working the site, the Yongxing Dao-863, the Tan Suo Er Hao, or the accompanying tug provides a capability to lift anything substantial, that is, items of lightweight tonnage in the order of 10t or greater.
While recovery of the Kursk and MV Sewol involved lifts that were likely heavier than the KRI Nanggala, the Nangalla wreck lies much deeper. Simple drum winches aren’t suitable, steel wires aren’t suitable, I suspect traction winches aren’t suitable. Strand jacks appear to be preferred. Heavy lift marine crane vessels such as Sliepnir don’t do long lifts. I suspect that a unique salvage rig will be necessary.
I say “expect/suspect” as I am merely an interested observer of marine heavy lift vessels and have attempted to inform myself of their capabilties. The (in)famous Harland & Wolff yard, nearby in Belfast, is now involved in offshore construction projects and quite a few curiosities have visited the port in support of those projects, e.g. MPI Resolution and Svanen. However, ‘monsters’ such as Sliepnir or Pioneering Spirit don’t pass this way.
https://www.airlineratings.com/news/new-mh370-search-claim-dismissed/
Hmmm…
“The Cartoonographer’s latest geometrical construct…”
I note was dated 2020/11.
The ‘Pressure Drop’ was near 22°16’S 102°32’E at 20210522 UTC moving slowly – 2.2 knots, which is about 10NM to the ENE of the deepest (≅ -6625m) part of the Wallaby Zenith Fracture Zone.
This graphic of the Zenith Plateau area will assist.
@Don Thompson. Some band width spare still for this topic I see.
Back of an envelope, as you imply, steel rope deep lift capacity will be much reduced by supporting its own weight. Strand jacks reduce sheave stress raisers, though offset to some extent by compressive stress from the wedging grips.
An oil wells has been drilled on land to over 9,500 metres I see, over 10,000 metres in water. Glomar Explorer also used an oil drilling pipe string. If sealed, i.e. no need to get drilling mud down, that would add buoyancy to the string. By my estimate tensile stress at the top would be reduced by around half.
“Pioneering Spirit”. What a project: what engineering! Not configured for deep lifting but great videos thanks.
@Don Thompson,
“The vessel has extensive ROV capabilities and can lower 300t structures up to 90000ft of water depth.”
The vessel being “Balder” of Heerema Marine Contractors in the Nederlands.
In 1992 when I was involved with it, the crane capacity was 1600 tonnes, but following more recent conversion the specs have been upgraded per:-
https://hmc.heerema.com/fleet/balder
There can now be no confusion about the mission of Pressure Drop:
https://www.airlineratings.com/news/new-mh370-search-dssv-pressure-drop-debunked/
So do the ever-escalating false claims of a search for the debris field of MH370 now morph into claims of a coverup?
And there is this tweet from Victor Viscovo:
There is some incorrect speculation that the Pressure Drop, currently off the coast of Western Australia, is looking for the wreckage of Malaysian Flight 370. It is not. This is a 100% science mission with the Minderoo Foundation to explore & map the Wallaby-Zenith Fracture Zone.
Indeed.
https://twitter.com/victorvescovo/status/1396111833765920769?s=21
Sorry. Crossed posts.
@Victor
RE: do the ever-escalating false claims of a search for the debris field of MH370 now morph into claims of a coverup ?
Probably. That is the great danger in the spreading of disinformation. And those who spread the false claims bear responsibility for what it morphs into.
@BG 370: I’d say that those that continue to suggest that MH370 may have flown south of the Maldives are also spreading disinformation.
@Victor
If one assumes MH370 pilot was trying to hide the aircraft in a hard-to-find deep spot, the deep trench at 22 South becomes one hypothesis.
Shortly after you developed the McMurdo Path (2016?), I worked on a derivative path to this same 22 South deep spot. The deep spot is on line from POLUM to UXORA, and on GE almost looks like a runway to land on. It is also close to Ed Bakers pin, whereas Ed Baker’s basic theory is the pilot stayed in clear skies above about 22 South. I believe Mike Chillit’s original pin was further away. I think Chillit has moved his pin somewhat over the last couple years, to be closer to this deep feature.
Eventually the less-than-stellar BFO match of the McMurdo path made me favor DrB’s older pin at 35 South, which matched BFO very well. These days I favor MH370 probably keep flying below 22 South probably approx. 180S. But I do have this 22 South deep spot as a back-up pin in case the MH370 pilot diverted from 180S after the 2314 sat call.
Perhaps we can take the lack of finding debris here as semi-proof that MH370 is in fact further South.
@TBill: The search area is too far from the 7th arc. The only outcome is that the promoter of this spot will have even less credibility.
I asked: So do the ever-escalating false claims of a search for the debris field of MH370 now morph into claims of a coverup?
On cue.
@Victor,
“On cue” . . but blames everyone else, even to the point of defaming them.
Seems to have awarded himself a PhD too, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Funny . . . no record of that [under either name] in the university records.
In April 2014 a briefing to the families of passengers on MH370 was held at the Lido Hotel in Beijing. At that briefing a chart labelled 7 Data Points, later to become known as the “Fuzzy Chart of Elevation Angles”, was screened. This chart provided a deal of very useful information to the IG and others.
See this link:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duncansteel.com%2Farchives%2F1330&psig=AOvVaw0ykvpJw1iXiPhjhgqMpZZw&ust=1622260594596000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCPCe–W96_ACFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
I have never understood the origin of this chart. In order to calculate the elevation angles the originators must surely have used the Inmarsat BTO data, but the chart was presented before the Inmarsat Communications logs were released.
It’s not a huge step from calculating the Elevation Angles, to then [or at the same time], calculate the approximate “Ping ring” radii. But there remained a deal of confusion about the interpretation of the BTO numbers and the “Ping Ring” calculation [among analysts] for a little time after the logs were released.
So, who did the elevation angle calculations? Who provided the information to the Malaysian representatives to then present the data in Beijing?
In March 2014 a briefing to the families of passengers on MH370 was held at the Lido Hotel in Beijing. At that briefing a chart labelled 7 Data Points, later to become known as the “Fuzzy Chart of Elevation Angles”, was screened. This chart provided a deal of very useful information to the IG and others.
I have never understood the origin of this chart. In order to calculate the elevation angles the originators must surely have used the Inmarsat BTO data, but the chart was presented before the Inmarsat Communications logs were released. Was it created by Inmarsat and provided to the Malaysian authorities?
It’s not a huge step from calculating the Elevation Angles, to then [or at the same time], calculate the approximate “Ping ring” radii. But there remained a deal of confusion about the interpretation of the BTO numbers and the “Ping Ring” calculation [among analysts] for a little time after the logs were released.
So, who did the elevation angle calculations? Who provided the information to the Malaysian representatives to then present the data in Beijing?
@Brian
I wish I had seen your paper when you originally published it….
I wasted a year duplicating your analysis totally in a vacuum which now gives me more confidence in my results. I got 19.873 for the decimal time of closest approach and KTAS very close to yours.
@Brian
wouldn’t it be JIT and probably boil down to NTSB or Inmarsat for the fuzzy chart? At a relatively early point, Washington Post published the indicative flight paths to SIO by NTSB.
@Brian Anderson: At the time the elevation angles were presented to the public, there was the general belief within Inmarsat and elsewhere that independent researchers did not have the complement of skills and knowledge to recreate paths using BTO and BFO data. Some might have thought that presenting the timing data in terms of elevation angle above the horizon would make it easier to conceptualize than ping arcs.
Re “Fuzzy Elevation Angles”…Looking back at my files on this subject, I was reminded of an interesting observation made by Tom Kunkle in Jan 2015. At that time, Tom uncovered an odd discrepancy between the fuzzy angles presented in China and the true angles computed from BTO data. Has anyone ever found an explanation for the divergence? See Tom’s 5 pager here: https://bit.ly/3c2sIwb
I think this “Fuzzy Angle” paper is worthy of much attention, so please indulge me as I paste the last few paragraphs.
This discrepancy suggests that the Fuzzy Angles are mathematically independent from the Inmarsat BTO data: it does not appear that the Fuzzy Angles back-calculated from the Inmarsat BTO distance data.
That conclusion that the Fuzzy Angles may not after all have been back-calculated from the Inmarsat BTO data is difficult to place into context: Given the coincidence in timing the Fuzzy Angles are clearly associated with the Inmarsat reconnection attempts. But if the they are not based on the BTO data, then where did the numbers come from? As shown in Fig.3, the Fuzzy Angles are in general better agreement with the nominal elevation angles used for aircraft antenna pointing that [sic] with the actually [sic] IOA satellite elevation angles used in BTO determinations.
This might suggest that the Fuzzy Angles have something to do with antenna pointing, but what? The disagreement in elevation angles while MH370 was at known locations might indicate that the Fuzzy Angles are the actual antenna pointing angles and not the on-board calculated pointing angles. I have suggested to Mike Exner that Fuzzy Angles might be the actual, logged and reported 9M-MRO satellite dish pointing elevations, but he is confident that no such pointing data is included in the aircraft to ground station communication data sequence. Is it possible that inclusion of pointing information in the data sequence could be Inmarsat company proprietary information? Mike Exner also suggested that whoever back-calculated the Fuzzy Angles might have done it wrong. But given that the first number (16:01Z) is correct, why should the rest be specious? The pedigree and origin of the Fuzzy Angles seems a minor mystery perhaps worthy of further investigation. If MAS were to provide the actual numbers, that would be even more interesting.
Re fuzzy angles. I think the reconciliation of this quandary is simpler than you imagine. I read somewhere [tho’ can’t provide a reference] that this fuzzy angle chart was a “first approximation” based on nominal (stationary, 0.000 N) satellite and spherical earth. Use initial BTO 16:01 to derive BTO bias. Then use subsequent BTO values to derive an elevation angle of satellite w.r.t. aircraft. Derived elevation angle thus derived changes when aircraft is stationary on the ground because BTO value is changing. I recall performing these elevation calculations a long time ago using nominal satellite position and spherical earth and obtaining excellent agreement with the fuzzy chart. Those calcs are buried somewhere in an old hard drive backup so unable to pull them up to demonstrate.
Paul: I suspected that explanation, but but never did the calculations. Good to know you did. Makes sense.
A few comments on the ‘fuzzy chart‘
Set aside what has been learned about MH370 path modelling and consider what might be derived from a single metadata record, without any ‘deep packet inspection‘, i.e. what is encapsulated in ACARS or other traffic traversing the link, or correlation to SSR/ADS-B or the satellite ephemeris. A single record of Burst Timing Offset, no knowledge of aircraft latitude.
One can only derive an approximate elevation angle, approximate because of necessary assumptions for the nominal position of the satellite, a constant flattening factor for the oblateness of the earth, and aircraft altitude.
The measurement of BTO was made possible with the new GES systems installed to support the Inmarsat 4 services and the Inmarsat 3 services were then migrated to this new SED Systems platform. IOR3 in Perth migrated in Feb 2013. Inmarsat staff have stated that, after the loss of AF447 in 2009, they understood that BTO could help determine the position of an aircraft. The SED Systems delivered that measurement.
Further, what operational engineering insight might that item of metadata provide? For an ops team, additional metadata is always valuable, with knowledge of BTO any ‘burst storms’ may be quickly localised.
@TBill mentions JIT. It’s important to recognise that the Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370 was not fully convened until late April 2014. What went before was chaotic and incoherent (not implying that the ‘MIA13SIT’ was ordered and coherent).
A while back there was a discussion of whether the Malaysian Air Force has the capability to scramble jets in real time? Apparently, they did it the other day against a Chinese incursion headed toward Borneo over the South China Sea.
“Malaysia’s air force scrambled jets to intercept 16 Chinese military aircraft off the country’s coast in the South China Sea, a rare incident officials said Tuesday threatened ‘national sovereignty’.”
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/malaysia-scrambles-jets-intercept-chinese-131436029.html
@WP: 1:30PM on a weekday vs. 2AM on a Sunday morning?
@ALSM: This SCMP article goes into a bit more detail: “RMAF said the flights of the Chinese aircraft were first detected by its Air Defense Centre in Sarawak at 11:53am on Monday.” I guess that’s local time. I see what you’re saying, but if RMAF did manage to scramble jets on that Sunday morning, they would have been late in responding (which is consistent with your point) and hence had to play catch-up which would not have happened until about the MEKAR waypoint at which point any fighters would have been low on fuel.
Did anyone ever definitively figure out who or what caused that anomalous radar ping on the Lido chart if it was not a RMAF fighter jet?
Interesting that our friend Hishammuddin is still around. I figured he’d be in jail by now.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3135661/south-china-sea-malaysia-scrambles-jets-intercept-16-chinese
@Warren Platts
Warren, the discussion back then wasn’t around whether the RMAF had the capability to scramble jets in real time, it was whether they maintained a 24/7 Quick Reaction Alert capability at either Butterworth or Gong Kedak back in 2014. As Mike has alluded, there’s a marked difference between launching or retasking aircraft during “business hours” on a weekday versus trying to conjure up a launch at early o’clock on a Saturday morning.
As this article (https://news.usni.org/2021/06/01/chinese-air-force-fly-16-aircraft-through-malaysian-airspace-in-large-scale-exercise) states the Chinese aircraft were first detected at 11.53am local but the RMAF didn’t launched aircraft until 1.33pm. That’s over 90 minutes between detection and launch, although the reason for the delay may relate to a number of factors beyond just reaction capability.
The delay might have been timed to put the RMAF aircraft at the FIR boundary at or around the projected time and point of incursion. The RMAF aircraft involved were BAe Hawks with a 600-odd km combat range in their usual two external tanks configuration – it looks like it’s roughly 350 km from RMAF Labuan to the interception point, about an 18-20 minute flight from Labuan at high sub-sonic.
@Mick: Thanks for the link: “Most of the incidents were not publicly reported and the public statement released by the RMAF is a departure from the norm.”
I remember the discussion. Countervailing reasoning was Hishammuddin’s weird comment that “the American’s would have shot it down,” seemingly implying that they had a chance to shoot it down, but didn’t; plus other reports that “jets” were deployed to search for the aircraft in the early morning hours. The only jets in the RMAF are fighters. *If* MH370 was intercepted, it wouldn’t surprise me if Hishammuddin kept it a secret. And seeing a fighter jet outside of MH370’s cockpit window would be a good reason for the pilot to turn the ACARS back on to better get a local situational awareness. Not saying you’re wrong, just that the possibility hasn’t been 100% ruled out imho.
The Malaysian military officials responsible for monitoring the radar that night did not notice 370 fly back in real time. They saw it later by looking at the playback.
The attempts to recover the Indonesian submarine KRI Nanggala-402 have ended.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/indonesia-ends-salvage-efforts-sunken-submarine-2021-06-02/
@David: Thanks, David. What a tragedy, especially if it is attributable to poor maintenance.
@BG370
“The Malaysian military officials responsible for monitoring the radar that night did not notice 370 fly back in real time. They saw it later by looking at the playback.”
That is also my working assumption. If that is true, then the unexplained radar point on the Lido slide is either and anomaly or other aircraft in the area. If other aircraft, it could just a stray radar point from a commercial flight or it could be a non-Malaysian military flight of some kind, such as the Singapore radar plane known to be in the area monitoring the ship traffic in the Straits.
@Tbill and @Victor. Re anomalous radar point. Perhaps the anomaly was OCR or human transcription timestamp error when importing the radar positions into whatever GIS software was used for the depiction.
May 16, Malaysia, Brunei & Indonesia issued joint statement condemning the conflict in Gaza. Soon after, MY media reported that Malaysian security forces were reinforcing protection for Palestinians in Malaysia.
May 24, an IAI-Elta – B737 ISR testbed aircraft had reportedly overflown Malaysian airspace on it’s way from Maldives to Paya Lebar, Singapore. According FR24, it had hovered over 4 hrs in Singapore.
There was a lot of public reaction to this news in Malaysia.
May 30, FR24 also shows this same aircraft (registration 4X-A00) briefly in the Gulf of Thailand.
May 31, Chinese aircraft reported encroaching Malaysian airspace.
https://mymilitarytimes.com/index.php/2021/05/25/israel-aerospace-industries-elta-boeing-737-400-lands-in-singapores-paya-lebar-air-base/
@CMR: Here is the May 24th flight of 4X-AOO over Singapore:
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/4x-aoo#27cf0381
Unless I am missing something, if Singapore allowed 4 hours of loitering at 19,000 ft, I don’t see how Malaysia can object other than to express its usual disdain for Israel.
@Victor,
The initial flight overflew Malaysian airspace, triggering a lot of conversation. Then the Chinese intrusion happened.
BTW, now SCMP is questioning the actual number of aircraft , saying it may have been a lot fewer than 16.
https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2021/05/694212/israeli-aircraft-did-not-loiter-malaysian-airspace
@CMR: The flight over Malaysia might have “triggered a lot of conversation”, but as far as I can tell, the aircraft had clearance and did not deviate.
@Brian @TBill @Paul @anyone
Is there any other independent evidence that confirms the flight track on the Malay military radar Lido Hotel map showing the turn at Penang northwest to the mouth of the Straits of Malacca ?
BG 370: Yes, the Butterworth civil PSR data closely matches the military radar up to 18:02 UTC.
@Mick
Adding to your ‘unpicking’ of the PLAAF incursion off Sarawak. Before crossing into the Kota Kinabalu FIR the PLAAF aircraft passed through the Singapore FIR (WMKK does control an east-west corridor within the Singapore FIR, surface up to FL200). The incursion also involved transgression of the EEZ line. While the FIR cartography, credited to Malaysian Armed Forces, cannot be relied upon to be accurate the path as depicted appears to show the PLAAF avoiding the Brunei EEZ before turning towards Luconia Breakers/Beting Patinggi Ali which is one of the many contested features in the SCS.
My 2014 research confirmed that a RAT-31SL was deployed on the federal territory of Labuan (Regional Air Defence Ops Centre 2, Sector 4). While it has been reported that the RMAF acquired further Thales GM400s since 2014, I can’t confirm if the Labuan RAT-31SL has been replaced. If the RAT-31SL remains active, it’s possible that the report of ’16 aircraft’ is inaccurate, the air-to-air photography from the Hawk shows only 2 aircraft. It’s even possible that some of the targets were other nations’ ISR aircraft. I read one report that a RSAF G-550 CAEW departed Changi at a time close to the initial RMAF radar report, however, none of the 4 RSAF aircraft appeared on open trackers while an Aus registered G-550 was flying training circuits ivo Singapore.
@ALSM. When you say “closely matches” are you talking about the general shape of the trace or more specifically? Were you able, for example to assess the extent of discrepancy between last radar position per “military” radar (18:01:49 according to DSTG p17, 18:03:09 according to SIR p4), the Butterworth PSR dataset (18:01:21) and the Lido slide?
I was always struck that Butterworth PSR and “military” ended at the roughly the same time, give or take “coasted” positions. It seems too much of a coincidence if they were coming from completely different radar heads, range capability, radar horizon.
@ALSM. My question above prompted me to go back and have a closer look.
I don’t know of any way to determine accurately the lat-long of the penultimate [~1802] “military” position and its correspondence or otherwise with Butterworth PSR and LIDO.
What I did to was to use the Butterworth PSR record you previously shared to project arrival time at Pulau Perak. Based on the final straight segment 17:54:19 to 18:01:21, I calculate that the aircraft should have reached longitude of Pulau Perak at 18:01:57. That’s an excellent correspondence with the SIR statement ““blip” detected by Military radar in the area of Pulau Perak at altitude 4,800ft at 18:01:59 UTC”.
However, neither of these correspond very well with the LIDO slide. Using Bill Holland’s annotated LIDO track with timescale, abeam Pulau Perak occurs at 18:02:54 (1/10 of a minute before 18:03 on his scale). So the “LIDO aircraft” reaches Pulau Perak a full minute behind either Butterworth PSR or “Military”. I do recall a significant timebase offset on an earlier version of the PSR data but can’t remember in which direction. Ho-hum…
Paul: By “closely matches”, I meant the track and timing match within expected errors. The military altitudes were garbage (confirmed by the military), so I was not referring to any altitude agreement. We have no Civil PSR altitude info, except at KB, where MH370 passed KB at about 40,000 feet and 530 kts GS (TAS~502 kts). The fact that the TAS remained nearly constant until loss of civil radar circa 18:01 suggests that the altitude probably remained ~40,000 feet, but that is only an estimate.
@ALSM. Sure…I wasn’t referring to altitude and acknowledge that the wild altitude estimates attributed to military radar cannot be fact. I’m more interested in whether the position traces correspond. From my post above, I have determined although time over Pulau Perak from Butterworth PSR and “military radar” are in close agreement, both of these appear to be roughly 1 minute different from the LIDO slide.
In case you have attempted to match up LIDO position/track vs Butterworth PSR, I’d be interested to hear the results.
@ALSM, @Paul Smithson: I’ll add that if you take the final track as captured by the PSR at Butterworth and extrapolate forward, you intercept VAMPI on N571, as the Lido Hotel data also shows. The BTO and BFO values at 18:25 – 18:28 are also consistent with a trajectory of around 500 kn and aligned with N571, although an offset maneuver between 18:22 and 18:28 is required to match the BTO within the expected error. At one point, I was in the camp that doubted the Lido Hotel data. However, after the civilian radar data was obtained, I accepted that the Lido Hotel data was likely valid because it matched both the civilian radar data AND the satellite data.
One question that has never been answered is why the Malaysians did not release the Lido Hotel data to the ATSB. The ATSB never received the radar after 18:02 except for the final target at 18:22. One possible explanation is the Lido Hotel data clearly shows that there were pilot inputs for navigating by waypoints, which would not be possible if all aboard were incapacitated. In effect, the Lido Hotel data increased the likelihood that this was a diversion by the pilot.
@Victor. We agree that projected from LIDO LKP or from 1802 Butterworth PSR you arrive at Arc1 too early, requiring a timebase offset or some sort of manoeuvre.
But how do you account for 1 minute offset between LIDO and Butterworth PSR/military radar at Pulau Perak?
@Paul Smithson: If there is a time offset, I don’t know the reason. That’s a good question for the Malaysians. While you’re at it, ask about the large gap in the middle of the Lido Hotel data. Maybe you can ask about the military data at the turnback near IGARI, too. I (and many others) have been requesting the military data for years. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
I know you have been chasing the radar data since time began.
I also agree that in many respects the LIDO stacks up with radar evidence as far as this is known. Like you, I think it is odds-on that LIDO depicts the path of MH370. However, by my calculation there is a significant timing discrepancy between LIDO and Butterworth PSR (and “military radar” as related in SIR). To my knowledge, that has not been documented by anyone else.
The most comprehensive comparisons of the data sets that I know of is a paper written by sk999. In general, he found close agreement between all data sets, including the Lido Hotel data.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LZ5GKDLy-rm55HgjTeE-e9MXQ34u50A8_gpNH4Spa1k/edit
That’s interesting and a nice piece of work with sk999’s trademark thoroughness. Thanks for sharing.
@Don Thompson
@Mick Gilbert
RE: “The incursion also involved transgression of the EEZ line. While the FIR cartography, credited to Malaysian Armed Forces, cannot be relied upon to be accurate the path as depicted appears to show the PLAAF avoiding the Brunei EEZ before turning towards Luconia Breakers/Beting Patinggi Ali which is one of the many contested features in the SCS.”
The Chinese aircraft’s transgression of Malaysia’s EEZ has been mentioned in a number of news articles, but frankly it’s a red herring because the EEZ is meaningless for aviation purposes. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the EEZ provides sovereignty over marine resources, but has no bearing on the airspace above. Article 3 of the UN Convention of International Civil Aviation (aka ‘Chicago’ Convention) prohibits state (ie military) aircraft from flying over the territory of another State without authorisation. That territory includes the territorial sea, which extends up to 12 NM from the coast. International law does not prohibit military aircraft flying anywhere else.
It appears the aircraft remained more than 12 NM off the coast, and consequently did not breach international law. However, they DID enter the Kota Kinabalu FIR and flew some way south before turning around and heading back north. In my view that’s a safety issue, because there are a number of civil air routes in the area. If the Chinese aircraft entered the airspace without negotiating a clearance from Kinabalu ATC, they might well have conflicted with any civil aircraft on those routes at the time.
@Andrew
Very good point regarding national/international airspace. There’s a nicely referenced summary available here –
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.icao.int/APAC/Documents/edocs/International%2520Airspace%2520and%2520Civil-Military%2520Cooperation.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj5ra7wkYDxAhUCA3IKHRy8DxEQFnoECC0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0j4sl2DjMPK9i8a-eKgBav
@BG370
The general evidence of path up Malacca Strait:
(1) General match with satellite Ping Ring#1 at 18:25-18:28
(2) FO Cell Phone connect at Penang
(3) MY Military Radar and civil radar to 1802
(4) RMP (police) report refers to flyover eyewitness on Pulau Perak, but details are to my knowledge undisclosed
I would also note the sim data shows apparent divert to VAMPI (off path B466) and the observed re-logon of SATCOMs at 1825 is consistent with being offset on path N571, and out of radar range, whereas no other data interpretation has been well accepted. We have quite a large burst of BFO/BTO data at 1825-1828 that is almost, but not quite, a substitute for radar data. It shows a maneuver apparently taking place around NILAM, thought to be a SLOP or OFFSET for N571.
That’s my attempt. I call it the Six Pillars of flight to SIO, and it would be Seven Pillars if I add the simulator data argument
https://twitter.com/HDTBill/status/1221462723206221824?s=20.
@ALSM @Victor @Paul Thanks.
@TBill Thanks. I’d keep it at six and put the debris column in the middle. I sent you a message on skype.
@Mick Gilbert
Thanks Mick. That’s a very useful summary of the applicable international law.
Ocean Infinity has acquired a company that specializes in providing security for marine vessels.
https://oceaninfinity.com/2021/06/ocean-infinity-acquires-ambrey/
The MH17 trial judges start hearing evidence this week in the Netherlands.
Speaking to NBC about the Ryanair Flight 4978 hijacking, former Obama WH staffer Ben Rhodes had this to say (@2.35)
“I think Putin sometimes likes to demonstrate that he willing to flout international norms without regard to the consequences, to essentially call the bluff of the democratic world. I’m reminded of a situation that was probably some form of accident when a civilian airliner was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, over an area where Russian backed separatists were very active. And Putin obfuscuted, he blamed Ukraine, he blamed US, but again I think part of the point of that whole episode is that Putin thinks he can annexe countries, he can poison opponents, as he did to Alexie Navalny, and throw them in prison. He can assasinate people in third coutries, places like the UK, in part to make a point to any opponent of his regime, or in this case, Lukashenko’s making a point, that if you’re an opponent, you’re not safe anywhere.
Don’t think that because you live in the democracies, you’re safe there. And that’s a world that’s not safe for any of us Lawrence.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVSUCYyIWTw
Again, we see someone who may know something about what may have really happened to MH370, float the idea that the second Malaysian Airliner MH17 was shot down “accidentally”.
BTW, according to Irish broadcaster RTE…
Ryanair Flight 4978 sent 20 departure delay messages while it was on the ground in Minsk.
That is according to an internal report by the European air traffic management organisation, seen by RTÉ News.
The messages indicate that it was “not ready or allowed” to leave the Belarusian capital after it was forced into an emergency landing yesterday.
The report by Eurocontrol shows that the Boeing 737-800, en route from Athens to Vilnius, was forced to land in Minsk at 10.30am UTC and was not able to depart until 18.26pm.
The original departure time of the Ryanair flight in resuming its journey towards Vilnius was filed by the aircraft at 11.16am, with an estimated departure time of 11.30am.
However, the report states: “20 departure delay messages [were] received for the flight indicating that the flight was not ready or allowed to depart from Minsk.”
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2021/0524/1223628-ryanair-minsk-belarus/
– was this an attempt to overwrite and erase from the CVR what took place prior to the diversion to Minsk?
@CanisMagnusRufus
RE: “– was this an attempt to overwrite and erase from the CVR what took place prior to the diversion to Minsk?”
Unlikely. The CVR does not operate continuously. It only operates from first engine start until 5 minutes after the last engine is shut down. If someone wanted to erase the CVR, they could easily do so while the aircraft was on the ground.
@Andrew.
That surprises me. I thought the CVR was on whenever the aircraft was powered. This indicates (to me) that it must be operable before engine start.
http://www.avmax.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/CVR-Intelligibility-Analysis-Flight-Test-Procedure.pdf
@ventus45
On some aircraft (eg B777), the CVR does operate continuously whenever the aircraft is powered. On the B737, it does not. There is a VOICE RECORDER switch that has two positions: AUTO and ON. The switch is selected to ON during the pre-flight, to allow a pre-flight check of the CVR. The switch trips to AUTO on first engine start and the CVR then remains powered until 5 minutes after last engine shut down.
The crew could, theoretically select the VOICE RECORDER switch ON and leave the CVR running to overwrite the previous recording. However, it would be much more simple (and quicker) to press the ERASE button while the aircraft is on the ground.
CMR wrote “Ryanair Flight 4978 sent 20 departure delay messages while it was on the ground in Minsk. […] was this an attempt to overwrite and erase from the CVR what took place prior to the diversion to Minsk?
No! I suggest the “20 departure delay messages” were exchanged via Eurocontrol’s CPDLC over ATN.
There is no integration between datalink message and the CVR.
Ryanair aircraft do operate Eurocontrol complaint CPDLC over ATN (not to be confused with ACARS), that’s now a mandate. While Belarus is not a full participant in Eurocontrol, the flight’s destination country is.
Tony Connelly, of RTÉ, is a correspondent well respected on political matters: air traffic management and datalink, not so much.
@Don Thompson
@CanisMagnusRufus
I thought @CMR was wondering if the flight’s departure was delayed to allow time for the CVR to overwrite the previous recording, rather than the ‘mechanics’ of how the delay messages were sent.
I would assume the delay was incurred because the necessary government overflight approvals were not immediately available due to the nature of the diversion.
@Andrew,
“CMR was wondering if the flight’s departure was delayed to allow time for the CVR to overwrite the previous recording”
YES, exactly.
“I would assume the delay was incurred because the necessary government overflight approvals were not immediately available due to the nature of the diversion.”
Overflight approvals? From Minsk to Vilnius? These are neighboring jurisdictions! I also checked out a YT video about the incident released by an official Belarusian broadcaster. The talking head mentioned that the flight departure was delayed because some of the passengers/crew were psychologically ‘unprepared’ to get back on the plane and resume the journey.
@Don
“Tony Connelly, of RTÉ, is a correspondent well respected on political matters: air traffic management and datalink, not so much.
All the more reason to believe that this little detail was intentionally released, and has ‘political’ connotations.
BTW, did you know that the Mig-29 was scrambled when the aircraft had almost reached the Lithuanian border, and AFTER the pilot had declared his intention to divert to Minsk? It was flown to escort the flight to Minsk.
@Andrew
Thank you for the explanation.
Next question: “why is it so ?” (J S-M)
I would have assumed that the regulations re CVR specs and ops would be universal, but they have changed over the years, so is this yet another B737 “grandfathered” thing ?
@CMR
“…Again, we see someone who may know something about what may have really happened to MH370 (Obama WH staffer Rhodes)”
Perhaps I can speculate he is the unnamed Obama staffer who advised the media that the FBI found nothing suspicious in the MH370 hone flight sim data, which I suspect was an intentionally misleading, not a factual, statement
@ventus45
RE: ”I would have assumed that the regulations re CVR specs and ops would be universal…”
The regulations don’t require continuous operation. 14 CFR §121.359 states:
(a) No certificate holder may operate a large turbine engine powered airplane or a large pressurized airplane with four reciprocating engines unless an approved cockpit voice recorder is installed in that airplane and is operated continuously from the start of the use of the checklist (before starting engines for the purpose of flight), to completion of the final checklist at the termination of the flight.
Most B777s have CVRs that operate continuously, but those delivered in the last 10 years have a similar set up to the B737-800 I described earlier. I don’t know the reason for the change.
@ventus45
In my previous post I meant to say ‘The regulations don’t require continuous operation whenever electrical power is available.’
@CanisMagnusRufus
RE: “Overflight approvals? From Minsk to Vilnius? These are neighboring jurisdictions!”
It doesn’t matter. Flights that cross an international boundary normally need an overflight permit from the countries concerned. Permits for scheduled flights are normally issued to cover a block of flights over a specified time period, but this was a ‘one-off’ non-scheduled flight that probably needed a separate permit.
I’m only speculating; there might well have been other reasons for the delayed departure.
@ventus45
RE: My previous comment “Most B777s have CVRs that operate continuously, but those delivered in the last 10 years have a similar set up to the B737-800 I described earlier. I don’t know the reason for the change.”
After a bit of digging, I believe the answer lies in amended regulations for CVRs that came into force in 2008 and were applicable to turbine aircraft manufactured after 7 April 2010. Those amendments included a requirement for the CVR to be powered by a bus “that provides the maximum reliability for operation of the cockpit voice recorder”, ie an essential or emergency bus. They also included a requirement for an independent power source that provides 10 minutes of electrical power if all other power is removed. I suspect the change to the CVR system on B777s delivered in the last 10 years is related to those amendments.
Background info: http://federal.elaws.us/fr/notice/70-fr-9752
CRM wrote “Yes, exactly!”
A more coherent presentation of any suspicions might help others understand. In fact, ‘suspicions’ is too generous a description for another attempt to contrive conspiracies.
Concerning Connelly “and has ‘political’ connotations.“.
Of course the entire thing involves political connotations: a Belarusian, living in exile, and who openly wrote against the regime of Lukashenko was detained by means of an act of air piracy.
Connelly did not write that the Eurocontrol report was “released“, he may or may not have seen it. The comment inferred from that report is about as useful as the Ostrower-Pasztor reports describing MH370 engine reports. I’d suggest that among Connelly’s circle of acquantances in Brussels would be Eamonn Brennan, the DG of Eurocontrol, and fellow Irishman. It’s how the likes of Brussells work, reporters build a network. It’s not indicative of a conspiracy.
In any event, erasure of the CVR will not require hours of time to execute.
@Don Thompson
“I’d suggest that among Connelly’s circle of acquantances in Brussels would be Eamonn Brennan, the DG of Eurocontrol,”
The same Eamonn Brennan who sat in on CAPTIO’s presentation of their MH370 theory to RAeS (Brussels branch)?
This only makes it even more probable that this detail about the delayed departures were intentionally released so that those who would understand would see the parallels between MH370 and Ryanair 4978.
If MH370 was truly flown for more than 7 hrs, then the first few hours of CVR recording would have been erased, and overwritten. This leaves us with only the KL ATC transcript which is suspect.
The whole purpose of delaying departure of Ryanair 4978 is to erase and overwrite the CVR of the conversation had between Minsk ATC and pilots during the crucial minutes after the plane entered Belarusian airspace, and was first informed of the bomb threat by Minsk ATC. This leaves only the Minsk ATC transcript, which was released a few days after the event.
Why would Minsk ATC release the transcript unless they were confident there won’t be another ‘official’ record of the same that contradicts their version?
https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-ryanair-patrasevich-transcript-questions-bomb-lukashenka/31275279.html
@CMR: Irrespective of a link to MH370, and irrespective of the possible erasure of the CVR, the statements from Belarus do seem to be less than fully truthful. Also, I trust the skepticism raised by John Cox.
@CMR wrote “This only makes it even more probable that this detail about the delayed departures were intentionally released so that those who would understand would see the parallels between MH370 and Ryanair 4978.”
Nothing was “released“, Connelly’s report described the content of an “internal report seen by RTÉ News“.
[sarcasm] Brennan previously worked in Malaysia. Christophe Mueller left Irish airline Aer Lingus to take up CEO role at MAS, replacing Yahya who held post through the 2014 losses. In 2015 Ryanair sells 29% stake in Aer Lingus. Mueller then replaced by Peter Bellew, incoming from Ryanair. Bellew later resigned to return to Ryanair. It’s all obvious, innit? [/sarcasm].
Ryanair’s 737-8AS aircraft are equipped with Honeywell 980-6022 Solid State CVRs, an erase is completed in seconds. However, the engine run time and, consequently, the CVR run time from diversion at 0945Z thru to final arrival at Vilnius where it may have been possible to perform a download of the CVR would have been in the order of 120 minutes.
Best to work with credible factual information rather than reading runes down the rabbit holes.
In a recent interview to promote a National Geographic special, Bob Ballard says he wants to help find MH370:
Even if they didn’t use my assets (in the search), I know how to find things, maybe I could help walk through the logic of it all, but they said they didn’t need me.
I’m still game (to look for the plane). I would be more than glad to lend my intellect, but they’ve never let me sit down at the table,” said Ballard during an interview with regional media for his National Geographic special Bob Ballard: An Explorer’s Life.
Like other underwater explorers, he’ll still need to figure out where to look, which has always been the challenge.
@Victor
I hope something like that happens.
The effort really needs a shot in the arm.
I keep hoping (and requesting) coverage of MH370 by USA 60 Minutes. OZ 60 Minutes covered, but I would like to get USA 60 Minutes on the case.
@Victor:
Why not let Bob Ballard assist in the search? And look S of the areas searched thus far, as much as 500 kilometers or more, because there is imagery of possible wreckage that supports this.
Certainly the 60 Minutes US audience is still interested in the case of missing flight MH370. Is there anything to add that most aren’t already aware of? There are individuals who know of very early-stage rescue/reconnaissance flight(s), not yet officially acknowledged for security reasons, that encountered something unexpected/unknown while searching for MH370, but to ask them to elaborate would be to raise more questions than they are able to answer, at this time.
@Stuart: If Bob Ballard would like to help, I would encourage it, even if not officially invited.
Almost exactly 7 years ago I was in a hospital bed recovering from an AVR procedure, and contributing to Duncan’s blog and the IG publications at the time. The sleep deprivation and odd waking hours allowed time to do this.
The infamous Cartoonographer wasn’t active at that time, but he is today, and I am in a similar situation, in a hospital bed, recovering from a very complex angioplasty that had some very worrying moments over the 5 hour procedure. (I was awake and watching)
My recovery this time is being hampered by the stress levels that build if I look at MCs tweets each day. We all know the guy is a nutter. His geometry is completely illogical, his distortion of the facts is just astonishing, and yet he is convinced he is correct and then proceeds to denigrate everyone else with his conspiracies.
Trying to engaged the guy sensibly doesn’t work. Many of us have tried, and incurred his wrath. But, I was wondering . . .what if a respected journalist (Bernard Langan is one who comes to mind because he offered a tweet as a comment a couple of days ago) were to engage respected professor of mathematics to test and comment on the Chillit geometry, and then publish a little article on the result. I know it doesn’t require a math professor. Goodness me, even a high school grad would be able to see the illogicality of it all.
Otherwise I’m open to suggestions as to how I shut this nutter out of my mind while I’m laying here, bored out of my brain.
@Brian: First of all, I am happy to hear the surgery went well. I remember quite well when you recovered from the AVR procedure.
Unfortunately, I don’t know a way to demonstrate to the Cartoonographer that he is wrong. Many people have tried to do so, including me. Even without any math background, one can see that he defines his “radical line” based on what is known at takeoff, and then his point of impact is the intersection of this radical line and the 7th arc (which he incorrectly calculates). There is absolutely no way to know at takeoff that the crash will be along this radical line.
Luckily, I know of nobody of any influence that believes a word he says. I just ignore his silliness, as difficult as it may be at times. I am sorry that it is adding to your level of stress.
“French indie Federation Entertainment has announced MH370, a documentary series exploring the tragic 2014 disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight.
Produced with So In Love, the media production unit of So Press, MH370 is a 5 x 45-minute docuseries examining the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which still has no official explanation seven years later.”
…..”Federation Entertainment will handle worldwide sales.”
Revelations/theories and balance between documentary and “entertainment” remain to be seen.
https://realscreen.com/2021/06/21/extra-rocket-rights-reps-uk-crime-series-doc-series-on-lost-2014-malaysia-airlines-flight/
@David: There have been some French journalists that have covered MH370 well, and others not so well. We’ll see how well this documentary does, recognizing that sensationalism tends to be more entertaining. In any event, there is not likely to be anything presented that is unknown to the commenters here.
Victor Vescovo describes his recent scientific expedition:
During our recent joint scientific expedition with the Minderoo Foundation, we were able to map 10,460 square kilometers of new seafloor at high resolution in the Wallaby-Zenith Fracture Zone. Multiple dives were executed along most interesting areas from 3425-6698 meters (A-E).
@Victor. Second try. While I see no connection with MH370, for those interested in hypoxia this may be new:
https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/news-items/2021/freighter-depressurisation
Those pesky aliens. The report just out. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf
Another miscellaneous subject – ‘Ever Given’.
Bloomberg has published a rather interesting article on what apparently happened onboard the vessel on 23 March 2021, along with the now prolonged outcome.
https://tinyurl.com/vv5hxm2k
Though, if and when the vessel is released by the Suez Canal Authority, the ongoing drama will probably last for a number of years as disputes over liability for a share of the General Average insurance settlement will largely fall on the shippers of each container of cargo being carried. Then the consignors and the consignees will need to deal with the separate insurance claims under Particular Average associated with the delays, losses etc. to the goods in each transported container (17,600).
@Paul Smithson:
Thank you for the link. This report/acknowledgement is a big step forward in the study of UAPs. I’d especially like to see the classified version which likely has full-motion video clips and images of aerial objects that remain unidentified. I’ve submitted annotated digital GEOINT products derived from EO/IR/SAR/FMV platforms/sensors showing UAPs and very rarely received any feedback, it appears that someone was paying attention after all ….
@Stuart: Do you believe that any of your products were included in the 143 unexplainable incidents?
@Barry Carlson: Thank you for the link. I now understand why some captains would prefer a colonoscopy to transiting the Suez Canal.
@David: What’s interesting to me is the additional complications that were due to improper use of emergency equipment.
@Victor:
I hope that some of the images I forwarded are among those studied and labeled as unidentified. This would provide added value to the “customer” (the command, agency, task force etc. who is requesting imagery analysis of that area), the reason being that these UAPs were spotted by chance and not because they were among the essential elements of information/focus of a given search.
@Victor
@David
RE: “What’s interesting to me is the additional complications that were due to improper use of emergency equipment.”
I’m surprised they didn’t explore that aspect further. The captain’s use of the ‘Emergency’ setting on the oxygen mask wasn’t necessarily ‘improper’. According to the manuals, the positive pressure is intended to purge contaminants from the mask and to protects against smoke and fumes. In this case, the FO was concerned about the possibility of incapacitation due to fumes, but the report doesn’t say if the captain deliberately selected Emergency for that reason.
@Andrew: If proper use of the emergency equipment resulted in reduced cognitive ability, that should definitely be better explained.
@Victor
Absolutely. I suspect that lack of training in pressure breathing technique was a factor, but the investigation didn’t explore the reasons for the captain’s incapacitation.
@Andrew, Victor. 737-376 flight crew oxygen problems.
Andrew’s, “I suspect that lack of training in pressure breathing technique was a factor, but the investigation didn’t explore the reasons for the captain’s incapacitation.”
I attach some remarks about that and the ATSB report more generally:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zgrsqa03m9muhgh/Comments%20on%20ATSB%20report%20on%20737%20oxygen%20and%20air%20conditioning%20incident..docx?dl=0
@David
It reminded me about the Ryanair 737 cabin pressure incident in 2018, for which I found some partial explanation of what happened. For some unclear reason, the outflow valve opened wide. Surprising how fast the outflow valve opened and how fast the cabin pressure altitude rose. MS flight sim (for B777) seems to suggest some slower times to depressure.
https://www.aeroinside.com/11758/ryanair-b738-near-frankfurt-on-jul-13th-2018-loss-of-cabin-pressure-33-passengers-feeling-unwell
@David
Thanks David, you raise some interesting points. The ATSB takes an excessive amount of time to produce reports nowadays, even in cases that seem relatively simple. When reports are finally published, they often appear superficial and leave many questions unanswered. I suspect it’s a resource issue.
@Andrew. I have sent the gist of this to the ATSB in case it should be a resources issue and it might help.
@TBill. Yes the high outflow valve opening rate and depressurisation rate at altitude are shown here (see p14):
https://www.bfu-web.de/EN/Publications/Investigation%20Report/2018/Freport_18-0975-EX_B737_CabinPressure.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
I think the cabin altitude rate (top graph) is topped out as it appears to be limited similarly later when the outflow valve was reopened.
That was hard on the ears once more, the pressure differential being even higher then, the relief valve operating, though the outflow valve opened more slowly (bottom graph).
There was speculation that the crew’s weird cabin altitude readings (page 5, 24,000, 25,000, 33,000ft) on the way down were in fact misreadings.
Re the MS 777 flight sim rate, maybe a wide open 737 outflow valve is proportionately larger, area to cabin volume, than the 777’s two?
This instance does add to the likelihood that with MH370 there can be a high cabin altitude rise rate induced by opening the outflow valve(s), the packs and bleed air remaining on.
@David, Andrew, TBill
ATSB don’t seem alone in working through such extended periods from event to report. I was just about to post the link to the BFU report posted by @David: an Interim Report for an event that occurred nigh on three years ago and a final report not yet published.
Concerning the rates, both the 777 AMM and 737-800 FCOMs describe that operation of the OFV involves a much higher rate of change for the aperture when control is automatic vs when control is manual. 777 OFVs ‘can open or close completely in less than 10 seconds for the automatic mode‘ whereas ‘approximately 27 seconds for the manual mode. The 737-800 OFV full transition between open and close is stated as 20 seconds.
@Don
Yes that makes sense that the manual movement could be slower than automated movement of the outflow valve.
[Comments here are closed. Please continue the discussion under the new post.]